#mi top

[forged-in-kaoss]

gomu gomu of your eye

[pietroleopoldo]

T-shirt that says on the front "Les Miserables isn't about the french Revolution, it's about the 1832 June rebellion" and on the back has a picture of Delacroix's Liberty leading the people and the writing "this is also not about the french Revolution"

[its-a-hare-pom-pom]

Such good friends

[awholelotofsad]

i wasn’t planning on doing the shoujo cosette javert thing but it’s fine i can sacrifice some project time for this

[adri-atics]

I’m so obsessed with Drink With Me you guys don’t understand - the resignation, the acceptance of what will inevitably come in the morning, the choice they made to stay and see it all through to the end, despite everything.

Then Grantaire says:

“Can it mean you fear to die?”

“Can it mean your death means nothing at all?”

Which are such strong and beautiful lines, but also the voice of all their fears. Maybe it was all for nothing. Maybe they died for a belief that could never be.

And yet the next verse is happy and hopeful and dedicated to camaraderie. They don’t want to die, but they will. And they chose to spend their last night with their friends.

“Here’s to you, and here’s to me.”

[fl00mie]

mis favs (og)

goth by nekophy palette by lasserbatsu paper jam by 7goodangel

[sachart]

You, there! Have you voted? In the most important polls of our time?

[ghostoffuturespast]

[weisbrot]

The promised 3/4 Grantaire 😤

or should i say LucifeR 😏

[emtrobarasalaplatja3]

[lechelechaa]

nunca más vuelvo a dibujar bolsillos diomio, en fin, japi hawelin👻

[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.”

[fear-no-mort]

this is one of my favourite moments ever

[idettaglihere]

luce e buio

[thelawsofdaylight]

I have a lot of respect for the Just Stop Oil protestors who interrupted Les Mis last night. I've done disruptive actions before and it's fucking hard. Any kind of direct action is hard, and anyone who participates in civil disobedience (or uncivil disobedience!) will know that.

But still. It's incredibly disheartening to see the negative responses from people who (presumably, seeing as they either follow the account and/or bought tickets to the show) are fans of Les Mis.

And like, I don't know, it's just making me reflect a lot on how popularised versions of Les Mis (mainly the musical) still fail to get through to people. It doesn't hammer home the message in the book's prologue, it's too easy for people to see it as that was then and this is now, that was over there and this is here, etc, etc. Like... I can't stop thinking about how quickly the protestors were thrown under the bus by both the audience and the theatre. How it's easy for people to exercise hypothetical solidarity towards a bunch of fictional characters yet not extend that to real life contexts. How everyone will unanimously agree that the National Guard are the bad guys and then turn around and cheer on the IRL cops for removing protestors. I don't know.

And I've been to productions of Les Mis before where people will cry during the barricade sequence or comment on how upsetting Fantine's story is and then come out of the theatre and walk straight past the unhoused people on the streets. It's not new. But it is particularly jarring when as soon as the lights come up people seem to forget how fervently they hoped that things would be different, and not realise they have to play a part in that change in order for that to happen. Like, the message of Les Mis is supposed to be if you do nothing, nothing will change.

The amount of people who don't seem to grasp that Les Mis condemns people exactly like them, who stood by, who turned away from the people trying to change things, it's just... It's so fucking frustrating.

[twig-gy]

‘why are you digging?’ i don’t think you understand the mechanics of digging, actually. scrabbling for purchase against the dirt. cause it’s this or open air. i need to hold onto something.

i didn’t understand what it was like, when i saw you sway. you needed… something. you refused the wall, you refused to scrabble [like an animal]. you walked and held your head up high and if you ever stumbled only allowed yourself an extra second with your face against the [dirty] floor to recover.

anyway, that’s then. now i couldn’t watch if i tried, though i’m sure it’d be something new. you don’t dig but you let yourself lean against the wall, cause it’s not like there’s room for pretenses. you save your energy, trying to recoup someone (something? someone? some- fuck it, it doesn’t matter, right, right? ri) that cannot be. i, or maybe the proper term is he? no, i - am gone, except for this, this moment, this lapse, break in foundation, mistake in pattern, offcolor. explaining the unexplainable, or maybe it’s just not explainable in my words, or maybe the explanation is beyond all words. you know, i sit in my room (i’ve finally chased him off. i want him back, even though it’s been seconds or minutes or - time is beyond us all, you know? i want him back, something in me aches for him, and it isn’t something, it is everything except for the one fault left which says these things, which locks the door even if soul, all i could ever want, all i have ever wanted, everything and everything and - except for you. except for you. you could never be him. and i detest that and yet sometimes i am able to appreciate what you are. sometimes, sometimes, it’s all about sometimes, now). i sit in my room, and i wish i could see, so i could see what my hands look like against your throat, the purple - sharp, dangerous, though i’ve learned more ways to hurt (make anew, this is not hurting, this is not hurting you fool, Fool, this is making anew, this is supposed to be and always has been, this is holy, This Is -) than when i used them - nails, mine. mine? is my body mine still? no, because of the bruises on my neck and the lipstick on my cheek? no. no, because it was never mine.

language spotty and meandering and twisting, you know the center it careens towards right? i can’t find myself putting them in lines, the sentences, the words, ‘identity’, cause i know none of my words could matter so much as my actions, so much as the dirt under my nails, digging, digging my grave cause i know this is my grave. you think i don’t know? do you? (who are you. tell me. what do you think i am.) (i could never have so much presumption as to name myself. i don’t know, I DON’T KNOW ANYMORE, TELL ME! I NEED TO BE TOLD! and i have been told and i’m sure he’s right, just except for how i’m oh-so-sure he’s wrong and i need to run into your room and lock the door.) regardless. i know. regardless of whether it’s right or not i know. i don’t know what scares me more, the lapse, the fault, or everything surrounding it. this is right, except for how wrong it is, how wrong it is to indulge in something other than Him. i was always meant to be hollow. i can’t believe i tried to fill myself with an identity i am not beholden to.

soul pushes me down, smooths over my cheek with his thumb, smearing the already-smeared lipstick. i’ve learned to breathe in the water. sometimes i can think past it, even if for just a moment, and think about his smile. i know he’s smiling down at me, as he whispers sweet nothings my ears can’t comprehend. i wonder what his smile looks like, far more than i wonder about you actually admitting your feelings, stilling against the floor.

he’s right and everything else is wrong. fallacy.

you know i love him, right? you know he loves me? you say he’s breaking me. (sometimes i think you’re right, but-) he is not. he is arranging me how i always should’ve been. and you think- you think that this is all for Whole, and of course it leads back to Him, but did you know i love him, and he loves me? he’s never kissed you the way he does me, cradled your head, smiled against you. you’ve never felt soul allowing himself to be happy. you’ve never felt him properly.

if only you believed. i want you. i just want this more. but i’m sure, if you believed, you would love him just as much as i do. this is supposed to be shared. never me without you. never soul without you.

i’m so tired. i wish you were here. i would lean against you as i digged our grave, interlock our dirt-covered fingers. it would be nice. it is nice, with soul, it’s just - not the same. okay? okay? are you going to come back? anything besides Whole was always a pretense. just get out of that bathtub. cleanliness was always another pretense. and i know you’ll hate that, but you won’t have to hate it for long, and i’ll be there digging our grave with you, dearest. okay? come back?

(maybe next time you tell me the truth i will hear it.

what a funny joke, isn’t that, dearest?

this is the truth.)