#i suppose it’s partly that it has to have become a bit toothless in the obviousness of the offense

[toughtink]

is there a word for something that’s so wildly and obviously offensive that it circles back around to just be camp?

[jayoctodot]

The Silent Patient vs The Maidens

I will start by saying that I understand the appeal of these novels as page-turners. They are easy to read and if you want a twisty reveal at the end, you will probably be entertained and satisfied. That being said, I am SO CONFUSED by the near-universal adoration of The Silent Patient and the reasonably positive reception of The Maidens. The weaknesses of the two are strikingly similar, as well, which doesn’t give me much hope of seeing improvement from this guy, though I am intrigued to see whether he keeps repeating the same (apparently successful!!) patterns. These books were at least super fun to hate.

(For context, I read The Maidens for a bookclub I'm in, because several of the members had read and loved The Silent Patient, and one of them gave me a copy of the latter to read on my own time. I loathed The Maidens and then read The SP for comparative purposes. And because I'm a masochist, apparently.)

SPOILER WARNING! Do not read on unless you've finished both books (or unless you care not for spoilers). Sorry if it gets a bit shouty.

Here are the similar weaknesses I noticed in both:

PSEUDO-PSYCHOLOGY

-> Weirdly similar “group therapy” scenes early on where a cartoonishly unstable patient arrives late, disrupts the meeting by throwing something into the middle of the circle, and is asked to join the group after the therapist(s) speechify on the importance of boundaries (HA! None of these therapists would know an appropriate boundary if it kicked them in the ass) and debate whether to “allow” the patient to join. Both scenes are so transparent in their design to establish the credibility/legitimacy of the narrators as therapists, but instead both Theo and Mariana come off as super patronizing. The protagonists are less and less believable as therapists at the stories progress (though at least Theo’s incompetence is explained away by the “twist” at the end; Mariana, on the other hand, is confronted in the opening pages of the novel by a patient who has self-harmed PRETTY extensively, and rather than ensure he get proper medical attention, she essentially throws him a first aid kit and tosses him out the door so she can pour herself a glass of wine and call her niece... and it devolves from there).

-> Ongoing insistence throughout the narrative that one’s childhood trauma entirely explains the warped/dysfunctional way a character behaves or views the world, which is why the books go out of their way to give EVERY potentially violent character a traumatic childhood; when Theo insists that no one ever became an abuser who hadn’t been abused themselves, I wanted to throw the book across the room. (That is a MYTH, SIR. GET OUT OF HERE WITH YOUR ARMCHAIR PSYCHOLOGY.)

-> Female murderers whose pathology boils down to “history of depression” and “traumatized by a male loved one/family member.” Because, as we all know, depression + abuse = murderer!

-> The “therapy” depicted in both books is laughable and so so unrealistic, mostly because neither narrators function as therapists so much as incompetent detectives, obsessively pursuing a case they have no place pursuing (or skill to pursue - both just happen across every clue mostly by way of clunky conversation with all the people who can provide precisely the snippet of info to send them along to the next person, and the next… until all is revealed in a tired, cliched “twist”). Their constant Psych 101 asides were so tiresome and weirdly dated (also, the constant harping on countertransference got so ridiculous that at one point during "therapy" Theo literally attributes his headache and a particular emotion he feels to Alicia, as though the contents of her head are being broadcast directly into his mind... and I'm PRETTY SURE that's not how it works???)

CHARACTERS

-> Psychotherapist narrators with abusive fathers and pretensions of being Sherlock Holmes, which results in both characters crossing ALL KINDS of ethical lines as they invade the personal lives of everyone even tangentially connected to their cases (and, in Theo's case, violate all kinds of patient confidentiality. Yeah, yeah, by the end, that's the least of his offenses, but before you get there, it's baffling that NO ONE is calling him out on this).

-> All female characters are either elderly with hilariously bad advice, monstrous hulking brutes, or beautiful bitches (except for ~MARIANA~, who is Bella Swan-esque in her unawareness of her own attractiveness, despite multiple men trying to get with her almost immediately after meeting her. I'm so tired of beautiful female characters being oblivious to their own hotness. Are we meant to believe all mirrors and male attention have escaped their notice? If it’s to make them “relatable,” this tactic really fails with me).

-> All characters of color are shallow, cartoonish side characters, and most of them are depicted as unsympathetic minor antagonists (the Sikh Chief Inspector in The Maidens continuously drinks tea from an ever-present thermos, and his only other notable characteristic is his instant dislike of Mariana, whom he VERY RIGHTLY warns to stay out of the investigation that she is VERY MUCH compromising… the Caribbean manager of the Grove is universally disliked by her staff for enforcing stricter safety regulations at the bafflingly poorly run mental institution, because HOW DARE SHE. There's a very clear vibe that we're supposed to dislike these characters and share the protagonists' indignation, but honestly Sangha/Stephanie were completely in the right for trying to shut down their wildly inappropriate investigations).

-> "Working class" characters (or basically anyone excluded from the comfortably upper-crust, educated main cadre of characters) are few and far between in both stories, but when they show up, he depicts them as such caricatures. We got Elsie the pathologically lying housekeeper in the Maidens, who is enticed to share her bullshit with cake, and then a TOOTHLESS LEPRECHAUN DEALING DRUGS UNDER A BRIDGE in the SP. I kid you not, a man described as having the body of a child, the face of Father Time, and no front teeth, emerges from beneath a bridge and offers to sell Theo some "grass." I was dyinggg.

-> There are no characters to root for. Anywhere. Partly because they’re all so thinly drawn — and because we’re clearly supposed to view almost ALL of them as potential suspects, so they’re ALL weird, creepy, or incompetent in some way.

-> The flimsiest of flimsy motives, both for the narrators and the murderers. Theo fully would have gotten away with his involvement in the murder if he hadn't gone out of his way to work at the Grove and "treat" Alicia and his justification for doing so is pretty weak; his rapid descent into stalking and murder fantasy and his random ass decision to "expose" Alicia's husband as a cheater with a spur-of-the-moment home invasion and staged attempted homicide is ONLY justified if the reader hand waves it away as WELP, HE'S CRAZY, I GUESS (after all, he DID have an abusive father and a history of mental illness, and in Michaelides novels, that's ALL YOU NEED to become a violent psycho). I guess we're lucky Mariana didn't also start dropping bodies (because the logic of his fictional universe says she should definitely be a murderer by now... maybe that'll be his Maidens sequel?). But she especially had NO reason to randomly turn detective - and she kept trying to justify it by saying she needed to re-enter the world or that Sebastian would want her to (??), even though she had no background in criminal psychology... or even a particular fondness for mysteries (really, I would've accepted ANYTHING to explain her dogged obsession with the case. WHY were Sebastian and Zoe so certain she would insert herself into the investigation just because one of Zoe's friends was the first victim? WHY?). As for Zoe and Alicia, their motives are mere suggestions: they were both abused and manipulated, and voila! Slippery slope to murder.

WRITING STYLE

-> Incessant allusions to Greek tragedy and myth, apparently to provide a sophisticated gloss over the bare-bones writing style, which opts more for telling than showing and frequently indulges in hilariously bizarre analogies. Credit where credit is due — the references to Greek myth are less clunky in the SP, and I liked learning about the Alcestis play/myth, which I hadn’t heard of before - but OMG the entire characterization of Fosca, who we are meant to believe is a professor of Greek tragedy at one of the most respected universities on the planet, is just absurd. His "lecture" on the liminal in Greek tragedy is essentially the Wikipedia page on the Eleusinian Mysteries capped off with some Hallmark-card carpe diem crap. The lecture hall responds with raucous applause, clearly never having heard such vague genius bullshit before.

-> Super clunky and amateurish narrative device of interludes written by another character; Sebastian’s letter reads like a mashup of Dexter monologues and Clarice’s memory of the screaming sheep, but by FAR the worse offender is Alicia’s diary, where we’re supposed to believe she painstakingly recorded ENTIRE CONVERSATIONS, BEAT-BY-BEAT DIALOGUE, even when she’s just been DRUGGED TO THE GILLS with morphine and has mere moments of consciousness left… and even before that, she literally takes the time to write “He's trying the windows and doors! ...Someone’s inside! Someone’s inside the house! ETC ETC” when she thinks her stalker has broken in downstairs. WHO DOES THAT?)

-> Speaking of dialogue, the dialogue is so bad. Based on his bio, Michaelides got a degree in screenwriting, which makes his terrible dialogue even more baffling.

-> HILARIOUSLY rendered voyeur scenes where the narrators spy on couples having sex. Such unintentionally awkward descriptions. First we had Kathy’s climax sounds through the trees and then the bowler hat carefully placed on a tombstone before the gatekeeper plows a student. Again, I died.

PLOT/"TWIST"

-> The CONSTANT red herrings make for such an exhausting read. Michaelides drops anvils with almost every character that are so obviously meant to designate them as suspects in our minds. There is absolutely no subtlety in his misdirections.

-> The “crossover” scene between the SP and The Maidens makes no sense - when in the timeline does Mariana’s story overlap with Theo’s? They confer just before Theo starts working at the Grove, obviously (though Mariana appears to be the one who alerts Theo to the job opening there? Whereas in the SP, Theo has been obsessively tracking Alicia since the murder and had already planned to apply to work there?), but then are we supposed to believe that while Theo has been psychotically pursuing his warped quest to “help” Alicia, he’s also been diligently treating Zoe, so invested in her case that he repeatedly reaches out to Mariana to get her to visit Zoe and even writes Mariana a lengthy letter to convince her to do so??? And then a couple days after The Maidens ends, Theo is arrested???

-> But the thing I really did hate the most is how Michaelides treats his female murderers (who are both also victims themselves) as mere means to deploy a “twist”; there’s no moment spared to encourage our sympathy for Zoe, who was groomed and manipulated by the only trusted father figure in her life, and even after spending a decent amount of time getting to know Alicia via her ridiculous diary, where it’s so apparent that she’s been demeaned, objectified, manipulated, gaslit, and/or used by EVERY man in her life, she’s sent packing to spend the rest of her days in a coma… HOW much more satisfying would it have been for her to succeed in exposing Theo and reclaiming her voice? But no, she basically rolls over when he comes to finish her off (SPEAKING OF — ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THERE ARE NO SECURITY CAMERAS IN THIS INSTITUTE FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE????), writes one last diary entry, and drifts off forever. And then a couple pages of nothing later, the story is over. GOODNIGHT, ALICIA!

Both books kept me rolling throughout (by which I mean eye-rolling but also rotfl). Maybe I will check out his next effort — I’m morbidly curious what he’ll turn out. It does leave me wondering whether I should give up on thriller novels entirely, though. Are many of the weaknesses of these novels just characteristic of the genre? Maybe I'm just holding these books to unfair standards? I'm mostly only familiar with thriller films — many of which I think are amazing — but maybe you can get away with more in a film than you can in a novel.

...I really only intended to write a handful of bullet points, but more and more kept coming to mind as I wrote, to the point where subheadings became necessary. Whoopsie.

[whathappenedtomyweekend]

It’s Just A Spark Ch.4 - Second Glances

Hiccup was late the next day, earling a partly stern, partly amused look from Gobber.

"So … went well last night?"

Hiccup did not fail to notice his suggestive tone and huffed, running a hand through his unkempt hair.

"Not as 'well' as you think. We just stayed out pretty late last night and I overslept."

"Ah," Gobber acknowledged, still smirking. "Seeing as she didn't run away the second she saw you as you assumed-"

"Honestly, Gobber, that's a new low, even for you."

The older man just laughed. After a while, Hiccup uttered, "Remember what you said about not spending the time I spend with her in my head? The second she opened her door, I just sort of stopped. I spent the whole evening with her without second guessing myself. She's just …" he tousled his hair again, letting out a breathless chuckle. "She's something else. It feels like with her I don't really have to decide, or turn things over and over, it's … confusing. In a good way.I wanna figure her out. I wanna know what makes her tick and know the way she thinks."

"Oh boy …" Gobber mumbled to himself, thinking, 'he is absolutely smitten'.

oOo

Astrid was humming. While working. It seemed almost outrageous to be in this much of a good mood. She was supposed to concentrate on her tasks - even if it was something as mindless as cleaning the cages - and not on the events of last night! And yet, she couldn't help but let her thoughts linger. Specifically on Hiccup. She smiled as she realised she silently referred to him as Hiccup too now.

He'd walked her home that night. Usually people would simply insist on doing so and Astrid would refuse, but Hiccup had simply grinned that lopsided grin of his and had said, that if she wanted to he'd like to walk her home and Astrid had accepted, gladly even. It was the she realised she hadn't really wanted to say goodbye just yet. She'd never say this out loud but that scared her a bit. She wasn't used to these kind of feelings and wasn't sure yet if she was okay with them. It all had all gone a bit fast, but then again, this had been building up for some time now.

Her first impression with him then had been so different from what she knew now. When they'd met she thought she'd only seen his physical attributes and had seen him as this serious, precise and abrupt professional.

The second glance had revealed much more - of course, he still was outrageously attractive, but Astrid now knew that he was in fact not as serious, nor curt or simple. He was funny and considerate and thoughtful and gentle and, goodness, that wasn't enough. She wanted second glances and third, fourth, fifth glances. She wanted to get to know him - really get to know him, past his smile and his lighthearted jokes.

Astrid sat there in litter and sand and thought, 'I hope he lets me.'

oOo

It was already dark when Hiccup got home. He felt as if he'd been dragged through hell and back; his lungs felt accordingly.

"Hey, bud," he rasped and gently scratched the black cat's ears. "Sorry for taking so long. We had two fires today. I'm just glad everyone got out well. You hungry?"

Toothless meowed and scrutinised him with bright green eyes, snapping his tail. Hiccup grinned and click-thumped towards the cupboard, wincing slightly with every step he took.

"I can't wait to get some ice on there," he muttered. "Remind me to keep some at the office."

He watched Toothless eat for a while, then he carefully shifted his weight back on his prosthesis and shuffled into the bathroom in search for his diffuser.

'A one-legged fireman with asthma,' he thought. 'How ironic.'

His phone started ringing just as he set his foot into the cold water. Hiccup shivered and picked up.

"Haddock?"

"I heard you had a date" the solemn voice of his father established. Hiccup rolled his eyes.

"Hey Dad, how are you? I'm fine, thanks for asking."

"Hiccup."

"Okay, sorry. So Gobber already spilled, huh? That didn't last long," Hiccup commented dryly, heaved the diffuser onto the stool next to the bathtub and turned it on.

"No," his father replied but then quickly picked up the reason for his call again. "So? A date?"

"Yes."

"How'd you manage?"

"Wow, dad, don't make it sound like being a 23-year old man who didn't have a date in the past five years of his life is disappointing."

His dad laughed. "So, come on, who is she?"

"Her name is Astrid Hofferson, she lives a couple of blocks away from me, actually. We met because she set her stove on fire - several times, I should mention. It took me a while to work up the courage to ask for her number. We went out yesterday at had a nice dinner at the Che Dragon."

"Hold on, did you say Hofferson? That name rings a bell." His father stayed silent for a while, which Hiccup used to dry his still slightly aching stump.

"Ah, now I remember!" Stoick Haddock bellowed, making his son flinch involuntarily. "Astrid Hofferson, of course! She's at the Smith's whenever we have a get together with the company."

"Oh. Yeah, she mentioned working part-time in a bar."

"She's a nice young lady, Hiccup, congratulations."

He chuckled. "We're not getting married, Dad, we just had our first date."

"So there will be others?"

"Well, as a matter of fact, yes. I invited her over for Friday. I'm cooking."

He practically heard his father raise an eyebrow and sighed.

"I promise my intentions are honorable."

"Good, I didn't raise you to be a brute like your cousin."

Silence. A defiant 'Snot changed a lot since he was sixteen, Dad' was quickly swallowed back down.

Instead Hiccup replied, "I know, Dad, I know. But, um … promise next time you see her not to talk about me. She probably doesn't even know you're my dad."

"Alright, my lips are sealed. I'll see you next Wednesday for lunch?"

Hiccup smiled. "Yup. 'Night, Dad."

"Good night, boy."

Stoick hung up. Hiccup sighed. Twenty-three years old and his father still refused to acknowledge it. The thoughts about his father were loudly interrupted by his growling stomach. Right. Nourishment. Pasta sounded good. Humming lightly Hiccup strapped his prosthesis back on and made his way back downstairs where Toothless waited for him. On the way down he idly wondered what Astrid's favourite kind of pasta was.

oOo

'Quickfire question: favourite kind of pasta?'

Astrid's heart jumped. Trying to bite back a grin, she texted back, 'Alfredo in terms of fettuchine or spaghetti etc , but Lasagna has a special spot in my heart. Yours? Though I feel like your message served some future reference..'.

Still smiling she set down her phone and turned her attention back to the book in front of her. She was only a couple of pages further in when her phone buzzed again.

'you guessed right ;^) Can't go towards Friday unprepared! I'm a man of simple taste, I usually just make good old pomidoro'.

She hummed.

'Simple taste, huh?'

'well..'

'Anything else that applies to?'

He typed, then stopped. Then, 'now you're just messing with me.'

She laughed. 'You guessed right ;)'. And after a moment of hesitation she added, 'You had a good evening?'

She imagined him laugh and run his fingers through his hair.

'almost got fried back in the city, but got out alright, everyone else did too. Those are my favourite days'

'I'm really glad - also glad you made it out fine!'

'we also had to rescue a cat from a tree, so I guess that sorta balances it out'

She snorted and scrunched her nose. 'Was that a pun?'

A pause. Then, 'what if I said yes?'

'Then I'd say it wasn't PAWrrible.'

'I'm sorry, did you just become the woman of my dreams'

She knew it was a joke. She could even imagine the tone of voice he'd deadpan this with. And yet, she blushed, her heart singing.

'good night then' she typed back before she did anything stupid.

Hiccup laid on his bed, Toothless on his chest, his leg propped on his pillow, shielding his wide grin from the darkness with the crook of his arm and only rasped out over his blush, "Good one."

[meta-squash]

Brick Club 1.5.10 “Outcome Of The Success”

It’s long, I’m sorry. There’s just so much in this chapter!

The chapter’s first paragraph is a description of the misery of winter weather, bookended by sentences about Fantine. It’s been nearly a year since she was fired. The bit about winter is a description of Fantine’s descent as well as the weather. Winter brings short days which means less work; Fantine’s position in society means she’s finding less work as well because she is essentially freelancing rather than working for an employer with steady jobs. “No heat, no light, no noon, evening touches morning” is such a good description of the way everything is miserable and just blurs together when you’re trying to just stay alive. All the awful stuff is sharp and dull at the same time. “Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.” Fantine is starting to harden here; we see her become more shameless, tougher.

Fantine wears a cap after cutting her hair “so she was still pretty.” And this disappears so rapidly in this chapter. Her beauty is so important. Fantine is the only character aside from Enjolras who is repeatedly described as beautiful in a way that seems to really matter. (Cosette is also beautiful, but that description is almost entirely through Marius’ POV, rather than from a more general POV with Fantine.) The slow destruction of Fantines beauty--the discarding of her pretty clothes for peasant ones, her frequent tears, the loss of her hair and teeth, the torn and threadbare clothing--mirrors her social destruction. She desperately clings to her beauty by wearing a cap, but she obviously gives up pretty soon.

What fascinates me here is that Hugo mentions that Fantine admired Madeleine, like everyone else, but he also implies that she didn’t hate him straight away for her dismissal. In the previous chapters, her reaction is to accept the dismissal as a “just” decision. She works up her hatred by repeatedly telling herself it was his fault. It seems as though she lands on the right conclusion in the wrong way. She blames herself first, and only through gradually convincing herself does she start to blame Madeleine. He and his crap system are the ones to blame, but she comes to that conclusion in a roundabout way that feels like she still blames herself but is trying not to. Fantine has been a scapegoat for everyone up until now; Madeleine has become her scapegoat to avoid (incorrectly) blaming herself.

“If she passed the factory when the workers were at the door, she would force herself to laugh and sing.” She’s trying so hard to make them think they haven’t gotten to her, but it just makes it so much more obvious. The laughter and singing is the “wrong” reaction, and it makes everyone notice her even more, and judge her even harder. It’s just so sad because I can understand that behavior of trying so hard to act the opposite way of how you think people will expect you to, only it backfires and makes your true feelings all the more apparent, which gives even more fuel to the cruel people.

Fantine takes a lover out of spite, “a man she did not love.” There are a few things here that contrast with the grisettes of 1.3. This lover is someone Fantine does not love, her first relationship since losing Tholomyes, who she was in love with. The man is also a street musician, which reminds me of Favourite’s actor/choir boy. The difference being that Favourite’s boy had at least some connections through his father, and Fantine’s lover is only a street musician. Fantine takes this lover in for the same reason that she sings and laughs outside the factory: to try and show that she’s unaffected, which really only serves to do the opposite. She has this affair “with rage in her heart,” which seems to be the only emotion left for her for anyone besides Cosette (and maybe Marguerite).

“She worshiped Cosette.” My only comment here is that this is something that Valjean will later echo. Both worship and adore Cosette as a point of light, something to cling to and love and care for.

Okay maybe I’m missing something here, but Fantine can read but she can’t write? This is probably my “been good at reading/writing my whole life” privilege talking, but wouldn’t she be able to write if she could read? I suppose maybe it’s like how I can look at numbers and understand the numbers but I can’t do math for shit? I don’t know. That just caught my eye.

Fantine is starting to lose her inhibitions as she begins to lose control of everything in her life. She’s laughing and singing and running and jumping around outside in public, she’s acting loud and brash and odd. Her reactions to her misfortune and the terrible things that keep happening express the “wrong” emotion. It’s an attempt to cope, and a courageous one, but it’s drastically different from the quiet Fantine who barely spoke that we were introduced to.

“Two Napoleons!” grumbled a toothless old hag who stood by. “She’s the lucky one!”

This line really struck me. We’ve been tunnel-visioned on Fantine’s misery this whole time. Suddenly the focus pulls back a little bit and we get a little bit of perspective. Fantine is not at rock bottom yet. She could still go so much lower. To this toothless old woman, she’s lucky because she’s pretty and because her teeth have worth. Fantine is poor, and cold, and worried about her kid, and most of the town laugh at or scorn her, and yet this old woman still thinks she’s the lucky one of the two of them. It’s a much more subtle commentary on the levels of poverty and abjectness that exist. Once you’ve fallen through the cracks in society to the level of homelessness, to the level of selling your teeth and hair and body, to complete aloneness, anyone who has even a scrap more than you seems “lucky.” And Fantine’s not too far from that existence.

The conversation between Marguerite and Fantine about military fever is so weird. Is Marguerite just saying stuff? This dialogue sounds like a conversation between two people who have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s like those scenes in comedies where one person pretends to be super confident about something to impress the other even though both of them are completely wrong. Oh okay wait! I just did some googling and I’ve realized that neither of them know what they’re talking about because Thenardier did his bad spelling thing! “Miliary fever” is an old medical term for an infection that causes fevers and bumpy skin rashes. (Mozart’s death is attributed to it; it seems to have fallen out of use as it became easier to pinpoint certain illnesses.) I think this isn’t just Marguerite not knowing what she’s talking about. This is a misunderstanding due to Thenardier’s misspelling (whether deliberate or not, I don’t know) and neither Marguerite nor Fantine know enough to realize it.

ETA: Okay wow I’m keeping that whole “miliary fever” thought journey in just to record my thought process but I’ve just double-checked against the Hapgood translation and the original French, and the mistake isn’t with the Thenardiers at all! It’s entirely the fault of the translators. The original French says “miliare” and Hapgood has translated it as “miliary”; Fahnestock and MacAfee clearly did not notice that the French was “miliare” and not “militaire,” and neither did their editors.

“During the night Fantine had grown ten years older.” Off the top of my head, I can only think of three instances of not-old people being blatantly described as looking old. This description here, Valjean when he returns from Arras, and Eponine. There are probably more I’m missing, but the connecting factor between these three is severe, prolonged trauma. Trauma and a difficult life can prematurely age people (I always think of that Dorothea Lange photo of the migrant mother who was only 32 but looks 50) and Hugo uses this fact to bolster his descriptions of what they go through. But Fantine and Valjean both age almost suddenly; Eponine is already old-looking the first time we meet her as a character with dialogue. Fantine’s sudden aging is another level of departure from her old life. In Paris, she was the youngest of the group, and now she looks far older than she is.

“Actually, the Thenardiers had lied to get her to get the money. Cosette was not sick at all.” As readers, we know this. We’ve seen the Thenardiers lie over and over and we see Fantine sacrifice with no idea. But this one hits harder than the others. Partly, I think, because Hugo puts it so bluntly in a sentence that has its own paragraph. But also because this is the first sacrifice that is truly unalterable. Fantine’s hair can grow back. There may have eventually been some slim chance of a job opportunity or something coming up somehow, or an influx of things needing mending or something. But she cannot regain her teeth. This is also the first sacrifice that physically disfigures her in a visible way. She can hide her lack of hair under a cap, she can hide her lack of money by using and reusing things. She cannot hide her missing teeth.

It’s interesting that we do not hear about Mme Victurnien here. Rather than the last chapter, this would be the one where Victurnien would be “winning.” The consequences of Victurnien’s actions have now permanently affected Fantine’s life. Except I think the reason we don’t see her here is that she wouldn’t face it. She can look out her window at Fantine walking down the street in distress with her beauty intact and feel satisfaction, but if she saw Fantine walking down the street, toothless and hairless, I don’t think she would feel satisfaction, because she wouldn’t be able to connect her actions to this Fantine. Feeling satisfaction towards this level of misery would require acknowledging her participation in causing it. It’s one thing for the townspeople to laugh at or gawk at her, but I think claiming responsibility for her condition is something else altogether that I’m not sure Mme Victurnien would do.

Fantine throwing her mirror out the window is a strange sort of contrast compared to Eponine’s reaction to a mirror. Fantine cannot face her descent. Eponine is already there, and her excitement at Marius’ mirror is a weird sort of distracted examination of herself. Fantine cannot bear to examine herself because unlike Eponine, she can remember what it was like before this. Tossing away the mirror is tossing away the thoughts of her past life and her past self; she can’t ever go back to that.

“The poor cannot go to the far end of their rooms or to the far end of their lives, except by continually bending more and more.”

God I don’t really even know what to say about this line except ouch. It’s just so poignant and intense. The older you get the harder it is to survive, to get up with each new stumble. And we can also take into account things like the cholera epidemic that will occur a few years later in the book, which mostly affected the poor. There’s so little access to any sort of help or assistance. And clearly Valjean’s few little systems of aid aren’t good enough. He may have set up a worker’s infirmary and a place for children or old workmen, but there doesn’t seem to be assistance for single, unsupported women, or the homeless and unemployed. They’re left to bend more and more under the weight of life.

“Her little rose bush dried up in the corner, forgotten.” I can’t help but read this as a parallel to the Thenardier’s treatment of Cosette. As Fantine falls apart and falls behind on her payments, Cosette is growing up which means the abuse from the Thenardiers has probably increased. It also feels like a weird sort of throwback to the spring/summertime imagery of beauty and chasteness and modesty from back in 1.3, which has now completely disappeared and dried up as Fantine loses her beauty, her modesty, and her coquetry.

I love the little detail about Fantine’s butter bell full of water and the frozen ice marks. It’s such a small detail but so evocative. It also feels like a metaphor for each of Fantine’s new hardships. Every time the butter pot freezes over, it leaves a ring of ice for a long time; each time Fantine encounters a new trauma, she hardens and becomes tougher. She keeps her dried up, long gone modesty and youth in one corner and the suffering that has hardened her in the other. On a side note, I’m wondering if there is actually butter in her butter bell or if she’s now using it only for water? I would imagine water only; butter seems like something that might be expensive. Also, would the building she’s living in have had indoor plumbing, or would she have gotten water from a well or a pump somewhere? My plumbing history knowledge is lacking.

Hugo describes Fantine’s torn and badly mended clothes. At this point she’s working as a seamstress, which means she’s at least proficient in the skills needed to sew and/or mend clothes in such a way that they stay together. This means that the repairs done for herself are likely careless and messy. I think this is partly an indication of how little time she has for herself--if she’s sewing for work for 17 hours a day, she has very little time to mend her own stuff, and definitely can’t afford better quality material--and partly an indication of the ways in which she is falling apart. She doesn’t bother mending her things properly, she goes out in dirty clothes. She doesn’t mend her stockings, she just stuffs them further down in her shoes. It seems she has only one or perhaps no good petticoats, which means she’s probably walking around in just a shift and a dress. Not only is her stuff threadbare and falling apart, she’s also probably freezing due to the lack of layers.

“A constant pain in her shoulder near the top of her left shoulder blade.” This makes me wonder if Fantine’s left-handed. If she’s sewing by hand, by candlelight, in a shitty rush chair, for seventeen hours a day, that is absolute murder on the back/shoulders/neck. Whenever I do hand-sewing I’m usually sat on the floor or my bed, and my back and upper shoulders tend to get sore if I get in the zone and I’m bent over the work for a long time. I don’t know about French dressmakers, but I know around that time the English were really big on very small, neat, almost invisible stitches. Which would hurt to do for seventeen hours a day by candlelight.

“She hated Father Madeleine profoundly, and she never complained.” The Hapgood translation of this line is better, I think. Still, I think it’s important that it’s pointed out that she never voices her opinions or her complaints. It’s only when Madeleine is in front of her that she announces them at all (despite not speaking directly to him then, either). She hates Valjean, she blames him, and yet obviously some part of her still thinks that she deserves it, or that her dismissal was right.

“She sewed seventeen hours a day, but a contractor who was using prison labor suddenly cut the price, and this reduced the day’s wages of free-laborers to nine sous.” Reading this book is always a lot because aside from the still-relevant general overarching commentary about society and poverty and mutual aid and goodness and all that, there are so many smaller details that are so painfully, strangely relevant to the present day. Even today there’s fear that employers will come up with a new policy or a new labor shortcut that means less income. Employers who pay their employees less because the workers get tipped, or outsourcing that causes layoffs. Prison labor, too (and behind that, the fact that prison labor doesn’t guarantee a job in a similar field after release if desired).

In the next two chapters, we jump ahead somewhere between a few weeks to a couple months. What happened to Marguerite in the interim? Hugo describes her as a “pious woman [...] of genuine devotion,” but I have this sad thought that maybe when Fantine made the decision to become a sex worker, Marguerite may have turned her back on her as well. As we’ve seen with Valjean, being poor but modest is Good, and being poor and desperate enough to do something improper and “immoral” is Bad. Despite Marguerite’s canonical generosity towards the poor, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fantine’s decision overstepped some moral boundaries of hers.

“But where is there a way to earn a hundred sous a day?” I’m a little stuck on this. Would she make this much money? I’m basing the following information off of Luc Sante’s The Other Paris, so the monetary info might be slightly different a for non-Parisian area. According to Sante, someone like Fantine, a poor woman working without a pimp or madame and not in a legal brothel, would basically be working for pocket change. 100 sous would equal about 5 francs. If her earnings are basically pocket change, I don’t think she’d make 5 francs a day. Just considering the fact that a loaf of bread might cost about 15 sous, which seems like pocket change, or even slightly more than pocket change. Fantine probably becomes a sex worker and finds herself in the exact same position that she was in before, not making any more money than she would have if she had continued to be a seamstress.

[tothedarkdarkseas]

D'you feel like Gorillaz has become more gentrified? Like, they've really reversed a lot of the character design from Phase 1 imo. I can sort of see where "soft boy Stu" is coming from; looking at Humility versus Tomorrow Comes Today, there has been a huge departure of character. Same with Noodle (who is showing more cleavage than any other phase) and Murdoc (who seems to take himself MUCH less seriously). What do you think?

Hi anon! This has been tough for me to answer because there’s such a tension in the fandom right now, and as ever, I’m sort of the most useless type of person who falls a bit in the middle. I’m just doing a bit of stream of consciousness here, so I’m sorry if it’s ever unclear!

To start, I want to clarify that I do understand what you mean by “gentrification” in a more colloquial media setting like this, and I don’t want to seem pedantic, or like I’m picking on you or disagreeing-- but for me, “gentrified” is not really the word I would use to describe Gorillaz. Again, that isn’t me try to point to the dictionary and contest the meaning on paper, words evolve with us as our usage of them evolves, and in this context I’d infer it as meaning the project is being made more profitable for white and upper-class voices at the chief cost of devaluing marginalized people. Now, I know we’re talking about the characters here, but... Gorillaz is always a bit weird to talk about because it’s such a multi-faceted project, and I do have some regretful feelings that the work of hundreds of people often goes dismissed in the full scale of the “is Gorillaz bad actually” conversation. I do apologize if it seems like I’m willfully misconstruing the question to push the subject, I promise that isn’t my intent and I’ll get back on topic-- it’s just something I’d like to express some appreciation over while we’re discussing the good and bad of the project. There aren’t many bands in existence, and none on their level of mainstream fame in the English-language market, who bring this many POC artists to the forefront, heavily featuring not just superstar crossover collaborators but smaller indie or unknown artists performing on a larger stage without being asked to compromise the culture in their music. The fact that Song Machine has three non-English languages featured on different tracks, including Xhosa, is pretty cool and not something you often stumble across. That doesn’t mean the band, real or fictional, is perfect by any stretch-- but I’ve never gotten the sense that the collaborators are being used by Gorillaz or asked to follow only what they’re told, but that the band backs the collaborators in making the music they bring to them.

I recognize that’s not entirely on topic for this question, but it’s sort of aimed at the broader conversations happening right now I guess. Like, we’ve all been seeing a lot of strong feelings about the band by now, haven’t we? So er, y’know, hot on the heels of this album, I just wanted to ramble about my opinion on the band’s side of it, and whether Gorillaz as a band has lost what makes them special. As far as the music goes, no, I don’t personally feel that way, so I’m still pretty jazzed on this album.

As for whether the characters have been moving in reverse or stagnating-- I’d have to agree, yes, I look at soft boy Stu and it feels pandering. That isn’t necessarily to discount that anything of value has come from Gorillaz since then, they’re just... rather inconsistent. Truthfully, it’s difficult to speak to because I do have to take into account that my vision of the characters isn’t really entirely in-line with canon, even the older canon, but is much less so with the newer stuff. I can’t say there aren’t moments that have frustrated me, between art or interviews-- and it’s the things I know earn me ire to express because it is a selfish want, it’s the cute stuff people like that I often don’t, and so I have to step back and assess what is an objectively (or as close to objective as we’ll get) disagreeable direction, and what simply doesn’t gel with what I want the characters to be. I think it’s very often the latter, but of course there’s part of me-- as there is with near everyone in the fandom-- who thinks that something I really dislike is inarguably not as compelling. On the flipside, there have been bits scattered here and there that did gel with my ideas of the characters (this refers primarily to Stu and Murdoc) that seemed completely reviled and rejected when they happened. Er, so the wishy-washy thing I’m getting at is: yes, Gorillaz is surely different. In particular Stu is written and drawn quite differently, to the extent that there is a completely fractured image in the fandom of what “in character” means for him, and I’m not always happy with everything we get. I’ve had to just “distance” myself from canon-- which, to be quite honest, even though this is a popular mindset with shippers I don’t actually say it with much pride. I do have a sense of embarrassment at how it sounds for me to say it “doesn’t matter” if it’s in-character when I guess I’ve wished that I was... I don’t know, doing some kind of good and thoughtful thing for the character and his potential, rather than just writing him as an OC, which is what it increasingly looks like I’m doing. (Hell, it increasingly is what I’m doing, and I don’t love to feel that way but in the effort of honesty I do recognize it.) For Murdoc, I don’t personally mind his presentation nearly as much, though I can see how he’s leaning more cartoony by the day. While there were some missed opportunities for better Debunked sessions, better interviews, or better videos, I haven’t been totally wrong-footed by him either. At worst, the jokes we’ve gotten from him have felt a bit toothless, and at best I’ve also felt like there were some winners in there. I’d be glad to simply ignore the “plot” around the portals, but even when engaging with it, I can see the idea behind having Murdoc aimlessly chase them-- maybe for profit, maybe for control, maybe just because they exist around him and it is his core driving need to take and to have. That isn’t to say it’s handled as well as it could be, but I sort of just... look past it to be frank with you, haha. It hasn’t been spoiling me on Murdoc, I suppose. That’s just my own feeling, though.

I’m staying optimistic that the almanac will have some funny Murdoc bits, but I’m more nervous about Stu’s parts of it. I have hopes and fingers crossed, but I also have a lot of fear based on the direction Stu’s gone in for a while now. Yes, it does bum me out quite a lot, I admit. Hope springs eternal, though, and I do still perhaps foolishly believe that Jamie and the writers have a bit more love for mumbling, zombie-faced, “a bit thick” laddish Stu than they do for the soft boy and they might make some efforts to give us something. Touch wood.

If I’m being honest though, despite taking issue with a lot of choices I haven’t lost my love of Gorillaz as a project partly because I sort of think we’ve had rose-tinted glasses toward previous phases, and there is some extent of editorializing that goes on about the band’s history. I think Gorillaz’s plot writing now is pretty bad, but I also think Gorillaz’s plot writing has always been pretty bad. I think it rides on the characters like it has always ridden on the characters, and it is uneven in that respect because it has always been uneven. I think these statements-- that it is worse now, and that it is not actually a steep decline-- both feel true for me, but I can’t say how true they feel for you! And that’s alright! Just my two cents. It’d be a lie to say I’m thrilled with everything over the past two years or so, but it’d also only be hurting myself to lean into the frustration and force myself to become more upset if I have the ability to compartmentalize and make my peace.