#the blorbeaux

[nirikeehan]

OC Kiss Week: Sunrise

Borrowing the Blorbeaux Gaubert and Lautilde from @monocytogenes for today's entry for @ockissweek! Pravin gets an honorable mention.

WC: 494

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Sunrise finds Thalia on the balcony of her cousin’s Val Chevin apartments, watching the rays of dawn peak over the rooftops. The morning is cool, but she can already feel the heat threatening to overtake the day. A teacup sits on the table beside her, and she picks it up, blowing on the surface to cool it. 

“Ah, hello, hello,” she hears behind her in robust Orlesian. “Good morning to you, my dear.”

“Good morning to you too, Gaubert,” Thalia replies with a small smile. 

“Cannot sleep?” 

“Ah… a little, perhaps.” Thalia’s Orlesian is still rather rusty, her words coming in fits and starts. She ducks her head shyly.  Pravin — “Denci” in the company of Gaubert and his lover-turned-caretaker Lautilde — is undoubtedly still dead to the world, and will remain so for quite some time.  “I am excited to finally see the city.”

The cosmopolitan center of Orlais has been a destination of hers for quite some time. Not that she didn’t spend quite a lot of time here in official Inquisition capacity. But Val Royeaux was strictly business — or grief, she thinks, remembering the jail and Blackwall sitting inside it — and Halamshiral was the Game at its most cutthroat. She has never been to Val Chevin before, nor as she come to this country just for the pleasure of experiencing it. 

“Ah, and we will be delighted to show you.” Gaubert is not a large man, but he commands the presence of someone a foot taller: rotund and perhaps in his sixtieth year, but still somehow handsome: the grey hair hangs to his shoulders and his mustache frames a perpetual charming smile. He swoops in and kisses Thalia on the crown of her head. “Where does Denci plan to bring you first?” 

“Ah, something about a little corner bakery—” Thalia begins, but she is interrupted by a head of blond curly hair and pointed ears poking out onto the balcony. 

“Good morning!” Lautilde announces brightly. “Darling, can I get you tea? Coffee? May I make you some eggs? I do manage an omelette quite nicely.” 

“You could make me an omelette,” Gaubert comments. 

Lautilde swats at his backside with the newly delivered broadsheet. “Make it yourself.” 

Thalia stifles a giggle as Lautilde arranges the papers on the little patio table. “I have already made myself some tea, thank you, Lautilde.” That was one thing she learned to do in the field, at least. “I’ll wait for Fidencio to arise to take breakfast, I think.”

“Oh, you’ll be waiting some hours, I expect. He hates waking early when he is on holiday.” She narrows her eyes and wags a finger at Gaubert. “You have not been trying to seduce Lady Thalia, have you?”

“Me?” Gaubert’s thundering protestation echoes off the courtyard. “I have been but a perfect gentleman! Isn’t that right?”

Thalia nods, but Lautilde clucks her tongue and admonishes him some more. They truly are like an old married couple, Thalia thinks, amused.

[sneverussape]

*scoffs* i shall endeavor to obey you to the last, headmaster

—

honestly was thinking of @mmad-lover’s au for this ahaha.

[tealviscaria]

Another DTIYS of @dreki 's art!

The original

[conkers-thecosy]

It's all well and good having more than one blorbo, but how to refer to that one special blorbo? Your best blorbo? Your favourite blorbo? The blorbeaux, if you will.

[blanche-elizabeth-devereaux]

modern dutch van der linde and his blorbo, evelyn miller

[byberbunk2069]

[dykeredhood]

The way I actually clicked my heels together and stood up nice and straight when I brought up Commodore James Norrington to my grand-boss & how I prefer to see him in his nice sharp royal navy uniform with a new sword instead of all scruffy in PotC 2 & onward

[pixxystycks]

top 10 guys to kill with a rock;

1.) this guy ^

[ripeteeth]

my brain is just a lonely void waiting for a blorbo like an empty storefront waiting for a spirit halloween

[borealopelta]

gonna start soft launching my new special interest on instagram close friends stories i need my friends to know that there is something going on with my brain that has to do with the 1936 olympic champion US 8+ rowing team

[rubsjuice]

Blorbos from my brains

[wishcrafted]

ohhhhhh wait i do have a blorbo ig.

[nomilkinmyteaplease]

[sualne]

catching up on one piece after years and my favorites (mugiwara non included) are still the same a decade later.

[secretmellowblog]

Valjean + 7 & 8 (game ask)

For this ask meme: #7. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you like? And #8. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you despise?

Thanks for the ask!!

#7: a thing fandom does with this character that you like:

I love fix-its (I just want him to live!) it’s great when Jean Valjean gets to have a happier ending than his bleak passive suicide.  

Fics that explore Jean Valjean interacting with Other Characters (outside of Cosette) are also  great. He has such a narrow social circle in canon — he has basically no friends outside of his daughter— so playing him off other characters is really fun. It’s especially fun if (as is canonically accurate) he struggles very hard to interact with people and comes across as deeply weird. Jean Valjean tends to get “trapped in his own head” a lot, and exploring the relationships he could have with other characters– or just how other characters would be utterly baffled by him, while viewing him from the outside– is always great.

I also love fandom stuff that acknowledges how deeply strange he is. Any fandom stuff that features Jean Valjean breaking into people’s houses to give them money is always chefs kiss.

#8: A thing fandom does with this character that you despise:

I  was originally going to answer this with a whole passionate overlong essay about fandom tropes around Jean Valjean that bother me, but…I’ll keep it short lol because it's not really a big deal, haha. Like, I don’t want to be mean or unfair, and I like being in a fandom so large I can afford to be picky about characterization. I don’t like holding fanfic  to a higher moral standard than big “professional” media properties that are doing far worse. The most popular Les Mis fanfic on ao3 has maybe a couple thousand readers; BBC 2019, which is an utterly vile horrible conservative take on Les Mis and on Jean Valjean in particular, had millions of viewers. Fanfic writers have no budget and often no editors, so we don’t deserve to be held to the same level of scrutiny as massive projects like a tv show . Like I don’t want to overstate harm– fanfic is fine! Les mis fanfic is a tiny niche of a niche, and so small no one’s really being hurt by it. If I don’t like something, I don’t read it, and all that. I'm not here to be the fandom police XD.

And I really don’t like ever positioning myself as an “authority” on these characters or the person who does them “correctly,” because I’m not. 

That being said, if I were to be petty and summarize my personal Problems with the way Jean Valjean is often handled in fandom really briefly–

My core "pain" is that I feel like a lot of fans miss that the police are the villains of Les Mis. The police are the villains of Jean Valjean’s story and they’re the villains of Javert’s. Prison is evil. The carceral system is cruel and unjust, as a system. It is not a problem of Javert “not being nice enough to Valjean,” the entire system is fundamentally violent and vile and needs to be burned to the ground.  acab, and all.

I think part of why that gets missed is that many fans are laser-focused only on Javert–  and often on a highly specific musical-inspired fanon reading of Javert where he Did Nothing Wrong. (I'm not throwing shade, this was kinda also me when I was 13 lolllll.) And then they don’t analyze Jean Valjean anywhere near as deeply, if they analyze him at all, and don't pick up on the larger themes of the novel. And that's a shame, because Javert’s characterization will also suffer if you don’t have that wider context! I think the “problem” is just that if you acknowledge the complexity of Jean Valjean's character and his trauma, if you recognize how deeply Jean Valjean was ripped apart by prison,  how he has not recovered from his imprisonment and never will, and how he doesn’t view the criminal justice system with ‘total forgiveness’ but actually does have complicated overwrought repressed useless grief and rage over the system that abused him and the injustices he’s undergone, how he actually doesn’t like Javert on a personal level and only saved his life out of the same pity he would’ve shown to any other person in Javert's position–  it is much harder to see Javert as a Good Person and the police as a Good Institution. So as a result fanfic!Jean Valjean often  kinda has to be written as a bland saint patiently agreeing that Cops Are Great and Prison is Fine and Javert Did Nothing Wrong...because if he isn’t, the author has to acknowledge Javert has hurt Jean Valjean in ways he will never heal from, and question the morality of both  Javert and the police. 

 I think lots of people take the line “there’s nothing that I blame you for/you’ve done your duty nothing more” from the musical, interpret it as a sincere compliment, and then graft that interpretation onto the book— to the point of making it the entire core of Jean Valjean’s character. But Jean Valjean complimenting Javert with the Nuremberg defense (“it was all fine because you were doing your job”), and this being portrayed as Correct and Wise, is just not a compelling take on the character to me XD. I do not like it all. So I just don’t read fics that head in that direction. I'm not gonna content-police people, I just don't read it, haha.

I’ve been recommended multiple fics where Jean Valjean becomes Javert’s cop partner, or enthusiastically encourages him to return to the police, and it’s always a big “He Would Not Say That.” XD Jean Valjean, the most well-known victim of police brutality in the history of fiction, the character whose entire personality is built on the trauma of surviving incarceration and attempting to save others from his hellish fate, would never enthusiastically participate in incarcerating people–not even if they were  ‘bad’ people! It’s literally the core of his whole weird little Deal. it’s his whole schtick. 

And it's not that I hate Valvert either. I actually think Valvert can be very compelling-- and also funny, which is the most important thing. But part of the reason I’ve often stayed away from the valvert  fandom despite enjoying the Funky Weird Little Relationship is that I’ve had lots of trouble finding fic that gives Jean Valjean an actual life or character outside of Javert, or that also acknowledges the anti-police anti-prison themes of the novel.  But! There are a tiny handful of people who do it occasionally! And that's enough.

And again, this isn’t like the biggest deal or anything! I’m not a fandom cop trying to police what people write, especially because most people are just extrapolating from the musical/lots of people change their minds on characterizations over time/it’s hard to write without a team of editors to help you navigate things. These are just some fandom trends I personally don’t like, that I personally avoid,  and that I hope change over time….so that I have more fanfic to read that lines up with my own feelings on the characters XD.

But yeah those are my (abbreviated) years of spicy fanon Jean Valjean hot takes!!!

[allthepeculiarthings]

blorbo doesn't bring me happiness only a sick satisfaction when he's in agony