#you all seem to love it! and the things i make dont have to be percect

[neostellarjpg]

inner mono-dialogue

the more time i spend being davepeta with you the more i realize almost every single problem in my life was caused by my obsession with being this unfeeling cool dude

but youre cool already

like in the way that actually matters

youre chill and friendly and just nice and thats all there is to it

youre shamelessly yourself even if everybody around you is a jackass and gives you shit for it

youre similar to jade and john in that way

i really envied that about them

but its different actually being at the control panel and feeling where that earnesty comes from

it makes me wanna match your energy and keep that pawsitivity ball rolling even if it ends up being weird or cringe or whatever

fuck man do you know how exhausting it is building yourself social hoops to leap through all the time and when you trip up even once its suddenly the end of the world

what kinda dumbass does that its like dealing with life in hard mode for no reward

fuck that noise

i like your way better

Nepeta's heart burns and shines inside you.

:33 < thank you :))

:33 < but you know

:33 < i dont think doing things your way is unrewarding

:33 < its like

:33 < a shield!

Dave scrunches up with discomfort.

X33 < i dont mean that in an insulting way!

:33 < the fact is that shields are just purractical sometimes

:33 < it doesnt make you cowardly to hide behind one

:33 < in the same way that it isnt cowardly for a predator to hide in the bushes when stalking prey

:33 < its just a way to make sure you dont get hurt!

:33 < purrsonally i found shields too cumbersome

X33 < im a hunter after all!

:33 < and i guess maybe the same goes for my personality

:33 < its not really that im purrticularly brave for being myself

:33 < i just didnt have a say in the matter in the furst place!

:33 < honestly if i had a choice i would have loved to be more like you dave

:33 < you can befriend people almost effortlessly

:33 < and its beclaws youre also just a nice person

Dave recoils in surprise, but Nepeta passionately pushes forward.

:33 < fur real! i f33l it inside you! theres a really strong sense of empathy there

:33 < its just like mine! just smarter, and a bit more analytical

:33 < whenever we encounter someone mew, its like i f33l you lock onto them, and you gather so many insights into their purrsonality without even trying

:33 < and you can use that to bond with others without giving every part of you away

:33 < which unfortunately

:(( < i never really knew how to do

Nepeta sours with unpleasant feelings. Your brows scrunch together with both pain and sympathy.

Nepeta has a big and complex heart. She tried her best to keep it from spilling over, but it always did in the end. And it was embarrassing. It was embarrassing when your friends dismissed your hobbies or focused in on your strange quirks. It was embarrassing when they revealed they knew about your crush on Karkat that you'd worked so hard to hide. And it hurt whenever he would say mean things about you. He and anyone else.

But you always puffed out your chest and sucked it up. You stuck to your guns no matter what. Because it was fun! The things you liked, the people you liked, were fun, and they made you feel good. Why couldn't anyone else see that? And why did it seem like they never gave a single thought to who you were?

You curl in on yourself. Your chest hurts. You suddenly really miss Equius.

And you miss Rose. You miss Jade. You miss John and Karkat and Aradia and Tavros and Terezi and all the others. You miss all the people you can go outside and see whenever you wish, and you miss all the people that you have no hope of ever seeing again. You feel the choral echo of all the times you've ever felt this need for comfort, this thrumming pain searing hot inside you, like hunger wracking your stomach.

You clench your teeth. You remember being on your bed, curled in blankets, not having eaten a proper meal in days. You remember holding your stomach and sneaking to the kitchen, turning your shoulder at every step to look fearfully behind you, only for your fingers to falter hopelessly on the handle of the refrigerator, knowing there was nothing for you inside.

You shake with anger. You know that feeling. The feeling of being chased by something much bigger than you, a hulking silhouette of menacing strength following your scent through the thicket. You'd clutched a beast carcass to your chest, barely breathing as you stalked clumsily through the trees, performance wavering from exhaustion and hunger.

You'd almost died. You'd almost died often. And then after escaping death so many times, it one day claimed you. Casually. Unflinchingly. And the world beat on without you, leaving you stunned by your own insignificance. You'd looked out onto every preceding moment of your life, wondering if there was anything to truly be proud of in the face of your friends accomplishing all these fantastical things. You'd felt lonely before, but after that, you were truly walled off from every single person you knew.

And now, despite everything, you're alive again. Twofold, together with someone.

A warmth coats the ache inside your body. The two parts of you swirl together, feeling and tasting each other, trying to understand themselves.

It feels like a hug.

[clownzaf]

I know that people love to headcanon Tim as a child of Athena, I personally like to headcanon him as child of Hades due to his similarities with Nico and the fact that dead seems to follow that kid like a motherfucker but never actually reach HIM.

But hear me out.

Tim as a child of Dionysus. And he gets claimed during the Bruce-quest.

When he was in Gotham monsters were a usual thing. You never knew that they were there for your godly blood, you just thought that they were things created by pollution or something like that. And when he became Robin fighting things that wanted to kill you while saying weird things was more usual than a hug (not that that was a hug standard for Tim).

But then everyone started dying. His parents, Kon, Bart, Steph, BRUCE. Everyone. Every. One.

And Tim…Tim couldn’t seem to reach madness. I mean YEAH he wasn’t doing great by any standard, but he knew madness, he grew up in madness, and he wasn’t going mad.

The cloning was just a treat.

And during the Bruce-quest, everyone thought he was crazy, he was casted away because everyone thought he was crazy CRAZY Tim can’t he crazy! He knows that! He knows that in his blood that going crazy isn’t a chance for him. He made everyone crazy when they were around him (hence Jason. He knew that Jason was mad at him from the start, but going near Tim lighted a flame inside him that Tim is sure isn’t completely Jason’s) but Tim couldn’t go crazy. He could ACT crazy. But never too serious.

And then, in the depths of Greece, he met his dad. His real dad.

He always knew that Jake wasn’t his dad. The blonde hair his mother forced him to dye since he was 5 and the purple eyes his father forced him to hide with contacts told him that. But Tim grew up looking up at Jack, even if Jack didn’t love him, he was the dad that decided to (figuratively) stay. And Tim loved him till death.

But when that man appeared, Tim knew, with only a moment of stares, that that man was his father. They talked a bit, too. The man knew about everything Tim was doing, and that creeped Tim out, but when the man made appear a glass of wine for Tim (and one side for himself) and Tim drank it, he knew what he was.

Something on the flavor, on the feeling. It was Tim. It was home. Something he hadn’t feel in a long time.

He spent the rest of the quest feeling sure that he would make it, because somewhere on the heavens his dad was looking out for him, he promised he was. And this time it wasn’t a figuratively sentimental bullshit. His dad was really helping on the heavens. And Tim was gonna make it.

He saw him again when the quest ended. He appeared in all of his godly glory while Tim was living in the nest. He opened a can of soda and sat on his couch like he wasn’t a man Tim has only met twice, but that was ok, because that was his dad, and he was choosing to visit him. (Also, he wasn’t going to say no to a literal GOD) .

He yapped for two hours about the kids at the camp his dad forced him to work at ( “HE IS SUCH AN A-HOLE SOMETIMES TIM YOU DONT UNDERSTAND-“) and the more he talked about that camp, the more invested Tim got. At the end of it the man, his dad, just looked at him in the eye and said “y’know if you were there we could do this more often. Yer a better listener than that centaur. Also, I think your brothers would like having you there”

He leaves immediately for camp after that. The family thinks Tim decided to leave them for not believing in him, so it’s a shock when he comes back after the summer being great with a sword and with a Tan his skin haven’t known before, not even after fighting crime during the hottest days on San Francisco, and he was happy, like actually happy. A kind of happy he never was with them.

Tim made friends there. He was friends with Annabeth, a girl from the Athena cabin, who honestly thought that Tim was one of them after they had a talk about strategies on the field and all that, and was about to fist fight Dionysus for claiming one of her brothers. She still called him brother, but now she understood that Tim was a Dionysus kid. And her boyfriend Percy. They talked all night about the weight of being a leader and having your people die without you being able to do anything. Percy talked about a boy named Ethan and two girls named Zoe and Bianca. Tim talked about Steph, Kon and Bart.

Tim told him about the Bruce-quest, and Percy told him about the time he was ready to fist fight a good to get his mother back from the underworld.

He also fully loved his brother. Pollux was great and made him feel welcomed to camp. They talked during lunch and Pollux showed him every single thing that made camp especial. He also teached him how to make fun of their dad without turning into a dolphin, so yeah. They got along like a house on fire.

He also made friends with a girl from the Aphrodite cabin. Her name is Drew. She was kind of an asshole and tried flirting with him, and THEY DID GET TOGETHER FOR A BIT, but after some time they decided they were better as friends. And friends they were. Best friend even.

He never told the Batfam any of this.

So after some months in Gotham there’s a cult going around calling themselves “Children of Dionysus” and doing atrocious things.

Duke walked in on Tim trashing the training room of the cave, and later on Jason walked in on Tim having his fourth bottle of wine.

Tim was FURIOUS. Not only that was disrespectful to his dad, but to his brother and himself too. He was going to pick every part of that little cult and trash it.

There he meets Bernard. Then they get on a relationship.

When a sathyr comes to take Bernard to camp Tim goes with him, excited to have his dad meeting his boyfriend.

Dionysus has never been more uncomfortable than when he had to claim his son’s boyfriend in front of him. It wasn’t that hard before! But now they had those things against incest on the human world and he knew this wouldn’t be pleasant to any of his sons.

[atlasrayz]

Ok hi time to rant abt hazbin/helluva because i will forever be upset about the outcome of those shows.

Indie animation has been on a rise lately, with so many different amazing shows being available on youtube.

I watched the hazbin hotel pilot around the time it came out, and it really interested me. The characters seemed interesting and the premise wasnt really something you see often. I was excited.

I kept up with Viv's work and got into helluva boss. I thought it had some good jokes and the bits of lore we got made me want to keep watching. However, the premise of literally every episode is the same. A bad ex or a bad dad. Its a formula, and it shows up in Hazbin too.

Viv has some obsession with daddy issues, and problems with characterising her women characters. Charlie is the *main character* of Hazbin Hotel, but she has literally no growth or development. Millie also falls victim to this.

The one episode where she actually gets some attention feels... wrong? It felt like they were mischaracterising Moxxie so that they can fabricate conflict between Moxxie and Millie. Moxxie loves his wife, and he has literally never once been shown or implied that he would try to upstage her. Yeah, he's definitely got some inferiority going on, hes constantly being belittled by Blitz. Hes the show's punching bag, but i feel like it had never been implied that he hated himself more than he loved his wife. I hate that episode with a burning passion because how tf are you going to mischaracterise your own fucking characters.

I hate the way they did Lucifer. He should NOT have been some wacky, silly guy who just doesnt know how to reach out to his daughter. He's not bad! He's just anxious UwU. His entire character is irritating. Having a wacky fun character is fine, i love characters like that, but Lucifer shouldn't have been that character.

In the pilot, it was implied that Lucifer hangs over Charlie and his influence puts a lot of pressure on her, but then we meet him and hes just. A guy. Who doesnt talk to his daughter a lot. Which makes absolutely no sense. You could argue that they retconned a lot from the pilot, which, yeah, its all new voice actors so, sure. But then, why wouldnt they remake it in some way, in any way?

Not to mention that all the characters feel flat. Even in Helluva. In Helluva we get filler and backstory, but even then the characters dont change or grow. Quite literally the only good thing out of Helluva is Fizz. His arc and story is the only one that actually breaks from the formula of bad ex bad dad and his character actually changes from the lessons in the episode. I love Fizz for pretty much that reason alone.

Moxxie and Biltz have an episode where they promise to be nicer to eachother *and then they fucking don't?* They stay the *exact same* towards each other. If you're going to do that, then don't make a story based show. Make one of those slice of life, 10 minute episodes combined into one 20 minute episode that shows no growth, and is just there to be fun. Those shows arent bad, they just have a different purpose.

I've been so upset with the results of Hazbin Hotel. The pacing is awful, the characters have no time to change or grow, and their dynamics just arent interesting. It sucks because I saw a world where this indie show got on amazon prime (!!) And was amazing and did amazing things and set the stage for other indie shows to finally get big and then all we got was poorly written, rushed slop that feels like a huge kick in the teeth to anyone who cared about the show. Or, at least, it did to me.

[miijiu]

Hello, sorry for the long text and for using English, my Chinese isn't good enough to write to you properly.

I wanted to thank you for always writing your thoughts about Silvaze ⚪🟣 and expressing your reasoning and/or passion behind the two. My favourite Sonic game story has always been 06, but the difficulty in finding others who also find love in the story due to the memes and universal hate (which I believe to be from of the lack of understanding of the themes and narrative) makes it rather lonely.

I'm glad to hear you share the same thoughts that ⚪ is essentially a "shonen protagonist" as he's the one who wants to become a hero for others (versus 🔵 who fights for what he likes, and ��� who fights against what he dislikes). ⚪ Thinks about the morality of it all; one of my favourite things is that... He didn't hesitate in killing 🔵 at first, even mocking 🔵, yet when 🌹 protects 🔵...!! Because ⚪ spent time with 🌹, he re-evaluates the situation and wonders if it's the right thing to do! His earnesty and kind-heart is what separates him from 🟣!! Where 🟣 says "you're so naive" (I do think it's better if it was localised as "you're too soft" due to the double meaning of naive...) as 🟣 believes they cannot miss their chance to change the future. I love how ⚪🟣's obligations ties them together yet their differences still show... And that's what 🟣 likes about ⚪: his kind heart. Even in the end when 🟣 sacrifices herself, I find it interesting the English doesn't seem to have this line: "you should be prepared to make sacrifices", where it highlights ⚪🟣's differences; 🟣 is willing to go to the extremes, and ⚪ believes there's always another way, a kinder way, a better solution where everyone can win. It's why ⚪ is hope.

... Sorry, I ended up rambling unnecessarily.

I'm just very thankful you express such love for 06 and the writing, and also bring your understanding of the characters to light as it helps people like me realise we're not alone in this thinking. It must be difficult to express these thoughts publicly as the cultural difference and fanon skews the representation largely causing discourse or arguments which are entirely biased, yet you preserve and persist, and you create and share, thank you so so much 🤍💜

This means so much.

I dont answer to tumblr questions in general. but your words r really heartwarming and I hope you dont mind me sharing.

I relates to what u said. some of ur wording and understandings even capture the very essense of their characterazations that I found difficult to express.

I rlly like how you interpret the 🦔"naivety" as "kindness". I think that works enough to convey the subtext of the original language, and showing Silver's character arc in 06.

Thank you so much.🙏🤍💜

[normal-enderman]

My interpretations of people in the Life Series, as someone who is a very casual viewer and has no emotional investment in the series and barely knows any of the fandom knowledge below surface level.

Jimmy - stupid. so stupid. he barely has two braincells to rub together. but unfortunately for me i find it adorable. hes also blonde and young and pretty and im a basic idiot who likes young pretty twinks. he also has a really pretty smile. but hes so stupid. he sucks at minecraft. he dies all the time. his editing is also mid.

Joel - my second favourite after Jimmy. did I mention Jimmy's my favourite? no I didn't. im not basic. shut up. Joel is really cool. he's very funny and i love the overly-aggressive persona he puts on, he's one of the people who gets the most into roleplaying (it's basically his default for whenever he's on camera, he has a very defined cc persona that he never breaks out of), so it's easy to get immersed watching him. his editing is also seamless and brilliant. and he has good music taste. just a cool guy. i like the green streak in his mc skin.

Lizzie - usually when people call women quirky, they're being cringe incels who want a manic pixie dream girl. but i swear i mean it in the most sincere, old-fashioned use of the word way when i say Lizzie is quirky and i fucking love it. her aesthetic is cutesy pink kawaii, but the more you watch her the more you realise there's something delightfully strange about her. she's also incredibly fucking funny. the way she delivers lines just cracks me up. the way she speaks and phrases things and approaches the situations she finds herself in in general is awesome. despite her cutesy aesthetic, she's surprisingly tough as well. her editing is also a seamless, immersive delight.

Scott - master manipulator who gets violently mischaracterised by the entire fandom. he's definitely one of the smartest members of the Life Series SMP, he's always planning everything out, he always has a backup plan, he always seems to be three steps ahead. And again, a master of maximising his income of social capital. He's an expert at utilising his connections with the people around him, and always seems to be able to use his relationships to manouvre himself into an advantageous position. i don't understand why people make soft flower husbands art because Scott just seemed like he was taking advantage of Jimmy to me. in fact I dont understand why yall make scott soft in general, he's one of the most ruthless players from what I've seen. bit weird to mischaracterise "the gay one" as the soft guy, no? also why do you draw him as thin when he is chubby. why is his intro so fucking loud.

Bdubs - i have never watched this guy's POV because his editing is bad but he's always appearing in the corner of other player's POVs being adorable. he's like a little bug. he's always yelling and it's so incredibly unthreatening. why is his face all beat up like that what happened to the little guy.

Etho - he's friends with Bdubs and he's Canadian and he lives in the woods and fights moose and he's good at redstone and also some sort of cryptid. i have heard this. i have, however, not watched this because i have ADHD and the way he edits (or rather doesnt edit) his videos is so boring that i cannot watch them for longer than five minutes. which annoyed me because i really like his chill badass vibe and would like to see more of him, but alas. get better at editing etho. i also love the fan designs people make for him very much, especially when they make him into some sort of wolf or beast. makes sense since he's hunting all those moose.

Grian - HOT TAKE HERE. I'm not the biggest fan of Grian. His POVs are not very interesting. I guess people like him so much because he has a mad killer instinct and watching him hunt people down and get kills is fun. And this is true! I also like watching this! However, before it gets to the killing spree part, he's very self-contained and doesn't take much interest in what the people around him are doing (unless he is managing / leading them), which is boring for me because i'm interested in people's interactions with each other. Grian is actually far more interesting from other people's POVs, because from there you can see how his self-contained nature, tendancy to lead and thirst for blood and chaos affect everything around him, something which he himself seems to not notice because he is too focused on only dealing with the stuff that's immediately relevant to him.

Scar - what a charming man. oh my god. holy shit. sir. sir. what the fuck. he's also so funny. and has a little bit of the nature of a wet cat surrounding him. why does he love roleplaying being some form of scam artist so much that he choses to do it literally every single season. its like he cant stop himself. he has a scam artist disease. he also likes Starwars also one time he mentioned that he can't stand on twitter and everyone yelled his name. actually he does stuff that makes people yell his name in shock/exasperation a lot and its like a greek chorus. i also love the way he speaks in his voiceovers, his voice is very smooth.

Pearl - she has wolves apparently. this is a thing that i have heard about that has happened at some point. yes.

Cleo - they speak in a mocking tone and it makes me feel like i am being bullied in secondary school so i do not like them.

Impulse - this person does, in fact, exist, and may have done things at some point.

Geminitay - people draw her with antlers and that is cool

BigB - i have never seen this guy a single time in anyone's POV but apparently he is there! he keeps to the shadows.

Ren - there is a larper in this SMP. which is not a bad thing at all! I love hardcore minecraft roleplay! i am a Dream SMP fan, incidentally. which is related to nothing. The way he roleplays so intensely and in such a distinct style is a bit of a weird clash with the almost zero roleplay from everyone else, though. You have to all be into the roleplay and outputting the same amount of commitment to the bit, or it doesn't work and i just get secondhand embarassment watching. But I appreciate it nonetheless!

Other people who i've forgotten because i dont care about them - they sure do exist and are doing cool things yep

Thank you for reading my useless list, from a "fan" who isn't really invested enough to be a proper fan. I love minecraft men kissing. peace.

[breadvidence]

@ineffable-gallimaufry asked in the tags "#okay but quick question. i thought that in... well hapgood titled it vague flashes on the horizon i don't have the number exactly#i thought it was specified that his mother had gone to jail for fortune telling?? which was what i was basing the assumption off of#maybe i misread it or it was a weird translation i'm just wondering how that fits in"

Good question! You're right and you're wrong and you've been misled by some stereotypes. The line you are thinking of is in 1.5.5 and opens the paragraph which contains the quote I wrote this post around, and goes: "Javert était né dans une prison d'une tireuse de cartes dont le mari était aux galères". Tireuse de cartes is translated as "fortune-teller" by both Hapgood and Donougher, which is not a weird translation at all, it's sensible. The term more literally is "drawer/puller of cards" or more naturally in English "card reader", and refers to the practice of telling fortunes based on variously laying out or picking cards from a deck (Javert's mother wouldn't have been using Tarot cards in the occult sense you might be imagining--what the pagan girlies are doing now wouldn't be popularized until around the time Javert was born, when the European occultist fancy weirdo movement got rolling; his mother's deck you could probably turn around and use for a quick hand of the 18th c French version of Texas Hold 'Em). This is also called cartomancy.

While fortune-telling is part of the mystical, magical, satanic prejudicial associations with Romani people in Europe, there's two things to know: humans really fuckin love telling fortunes and have been doing so globally pretty far back in the record of our species crafting special objects, and also telling fortunes can be really really profitable. This combination means that Europeans of all ethnic origins were paying for their fortunes to be told and getting paid to do so. So, historically, there's not a meaningful racial/ethnic implication in this being Javert's mother's profession. The reason it seems like there could be can be laid, to some degree, at the feet of those occultists: in order to pump up the prestige and mystery of Tarot and fortune-telling, they whole-cloth fashioned histories having to do with origins in Egypt (and recall the Romani were also called l'égyptien) and other various ancient places "abroad", when in reality Tarot is from 15th c. Italy and fortunes are made everywhere. From a business perspective, you also get fortune-tellers making up personal histories having to do with foreign or exotic origins as a way to bolster their cred, further distancing the modern popular perception of this as a thing that white Europeans do. Hugo himself would've been very familiar with Parisian street fortune-tellers and is unlikely to have had a specifically Romani woman in mind when making this Javert's mother's profession, though we do have to acknowledge that he was influenced by that popularization of the falsified occultist history and stereotypes about Romani, too, rather than having a 100% accurate knowledge of French profession demographics.

It's unfortunately focused a bit later than the period we're most interested in if we're talking when Javert's mother would've been jailed (around 1780), but this article provides good context for Hugo's personal milieu, since I doubt he did research into the legal and cultural minutiae of cartomancy prior to his birth, and also it popped up near the top of Google when I looked for a reference to offer + is free: https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/37/4/379/7310795

As an aside: note that Javert's father is only said to be in the galleys--we don't get a specific crime or whether he was a lifer. While my fondness for writing and reading about Javert having a homoerotic dalliance with Jean Valjean means I like to think of his father being some kind of thief or other peasant-style criminal for maximum daddy issues, there's no textual evidence in any direction, and you could hare off on a fun alternative thought process about whether he was some kind of clerk doing labor because of fraud or another bourgeois crime.

Hope that helps!

[ETA] To be clear, this is still very much a socially questionable—and specifically legally liminal—profession, and I would personally infer from the itinerant/vagabondage implications of race de bohème that mama is fortune-telling because she doesn’t have the means or domicile for a more respectable profession (like Fantine’s sewing). Also? The fact that we’re told “breaking her ban” (not reporting appropriately to the authorities while on parole) is a specific crime Javert would not flinch from persecuting her for makes me realize I’m sleeping on his relationship with Valjean being centered on mommy issues.

" [. . .] il se sentait je ne sais quel fond de rigidité, de régularité et de probité, compliqué d'une inexprimable haine pour cette race de bohèmes dont il était." [LM I.V.V]

What did Hugo mean by this phrase? This is a question with a clear answer, in my opinion. Also in my opinion, this does and doesn't matter: it matters to understanding how Les Mis engages (or fails to) with the literary tradition of race and ethnicity in Europe through Javert, and it doesn't because most of my readers here are bent fannish in their style and do as much enriching of the text as reading of it. What I'm saying is: Javert is not a Romani man in the Brick, but there's no damage to making him one in your fanwork.

Hapgood translates this line as " [ . . . ] he was conscious of an indescribable foundation of rigidity, regularity, and probity, complicated with an inexpressible hatred for the race of bohemians whence he was sprung"; Donougher has it as " [ . . . ] he was conscious of some underlying inflexibility, steadiness and probity within him, compounded by an inexpressible hatred for that gypsy race to which he belonged."

So, bohème: at the time, you have this idea that the Romani people in France came from Bohemia, from which also bohémien, right? And because white Europeans had (and have) a complex, hateful relationship with the Romani people, caught up in exoticization and prejudice and xenophobia, unsure whether they were (or are) more enamored of the idea of free travel and "unconventional" lifeways (from which the entire "Bohemian" art movement) or repelled by stereotypes of criminality (for which see the modern American slur-derived phrase "to gyp"), by the 19th century the word is tied up in complex dual set of associations and is so frequently used in those two-steps-removed senses from the ethnic group it initially described that you can't in any specific case know which of those three meanings is intended without context cues. This is why we have Magloire relate the people of Digne calling Valjean a bohémien--in this case, this means "criminal, itinerant", not "Romani". In contrast, when in I.III.IV we are told "toute une bohème de papillons s'ébattait dans les achillées", these aren't Romani butterflies or imports from Bohemia, the intent is to evoke that positive (so to speak) set of associations.

What cues do we have here that point to the derogatory meaning rather than ethnic?

Within the chapter itself, Javert's hatred is elaborated on as "la haine de la rébellion", where rebellion is crime: this use of la haine, to my reading, is the same la haine as referred to in the earlier sentence, and the phrase "tout ce qui avait franchi une fois le seuil légal du mal" describes the same people as "race de bohèmes". In the header quote for this post, Hugo describes Javert's perception of himself; in this later section, the narrator elaborates and confirms the point. There's no ethnic specificity in the narrator's phrasing. Further, when we get to which class of criminals are particularly terrified by Javert, we're told it's the "gens sans aveu", rendered by Hapgood and Donougher as vagrants: an itinerant class associated with criminality; the point isn't re-iterated that he shows particular antipathy or suspicion of an ethnic group, but of a specific criminalized class.

Hugo never mentions it again. For how Hugo talks about Romani characters, we quite helpfully have Notre-Dame de Paris, and when I say that he cannot fucking stop talking about Esmeralda being la bohémienne, l'égyptienne, fille bohème: he cannot. A search for these word pulls up hundreds of hits for the novel. It's more than central to her character, it's central to how the narration refers to her, and it's key to how she's conceived of bodily and in temperament. Now: you could write Javert as so vigorously working against what it means to be a bohémien that none of these come into play in the narration, or that he wasn't raised in that culture and thus doesn't have any of those influences on his attitudes or habits, but (1) this is not present in the text (2) the reading "his mother is Romani, but this has so little impact on him outside racial hatred that it never comes up again" doesn't really do it for me (3) I would be surprised if Victor Hugo could parse the idea of being ethnically Romani and not temperamentally Romani.

While race and ethnicity are obviously an inextricable part of societal power structures, Les Misérables? It barely fuckin' cares about that (and to be quite honest I'm glad Hugo didn't try harder than his sort of confused gesturing with Thénardier's slave-trading in the end; he's not the man for the job). Javert's character is centrally about Law as an artificial, immoral tool that maintains a bourgeois power structure to the detriment of Society as a whole and the misérables in particular: introducing the question of race/ethnicity alters that one-note to the point of needing to be nested in a different novel. The topic of criminality and race is a whole fucking rodeo, and if it would be an interesting addition to the concept of "society does not include criminals; criminals are a class you can become by committing crime; criminality is an ambiguously heritable trait" that's going on here, it's not in the text. The fact that the idea of criminality as heritable has faded in our culture (it's certainly no longer considered scientific or acceptable to be explicit about, in any case) means that Javert's focus on the idea of being somehow constitutionally impacted by the crimes of his parents reads a bit through modern eyes as racial, but in my opinion that's crossing two streams that are related but not in fact identical.

A minor point, and one I'm less confident of, but: Donougher's use of the slur with a lowercase g feels sharp, precise, and deliberate in this context, particularly given she's European. In my experience, Americans tend to be far less sensitive to it--hell, I've got a friend of a friend who named her tortoise G****. Our racial hatreds focus elsewhere. The implication, here, feels the same as the blanket use of the n-word to refer to anyone dark-skinned. It's a matter of denigration, not a way to identify someone's ethnic/racial background.

Again: fanwork exploring what it would mean for Javert to be a person of color is both a fair place for the fandom to have hared off to based on the multiple meanings of the word bohème and a deeply intuitive step to take given how race and criminality are intertwined in the modern consciousness. What there isn't is textual support for the idea.

[arsenicflame]

Bonus round! Do you use a queue tag?

[luck-of-the-drawings]

"I think this is the most inhuman; and human, that I've ever felt.." MUCH CAN HAPPEN IN A YEAR. IN FIVE YEARS. A DECADE. imagine how much can happen in a century. just ONE (1). How will you grow? what phases do you find? even in 5 years, you will find patterns.

[daisybell-on-a-carousel]

Still very wild to me when people try to gotcha Jason with the whole "if you can kill other people for being evil why can't they kill you" when jason is like. One of the most passively suicidal characters I've ever seen. What if man

[dukeofthomas]

I need people to realize how horrible 'stalking/constant surveillance/breaking into each other's homes is how the Batfamily show love' is. Like i really need someone to just acknowledge how horrific saying this bullshit is.

Like even fics where they're shown as happy and healthy and with good ties, you've always got this thing where none of them have privacy or any boundaries with each other. Which is directly antithetical to actually having good relationships. And this invasion via hacking and stalking and breaking into homes is portrayed as a positive, good thing; it's just how they show love and care to each other, after all. But for some reason I just personally don't find stalking, lack of privacy or boundaries, and emotional manipulation funny, endearing, or healthy, and just end up disgusted at the attempt to sweep it all under the rug.

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

obligatory rock murder mention

[ax3faire]

I'm thinking about fanon Tim traits and why people write them so often - obviously a lot of the traits are found in first which then informs other fics, and I think people generally read them more than comics so a lot of people get used to them and piggyback off them. Otherwise though, is it just that there's room in a lot of dynamics, both romantic and family wise for someone smaller, more delicate? Is there any single instance in canon that has started off any of these misinterpretations? Like, there are so many fun premises out there for first but Tim is just written so wrong and I'm just wondering where it's all come from.

Also, what are some of your most hated fanon Tim traits and misconceptions?

[north-wilkesboro-moonshine-cave]

congratulations to Mme. Pascale Leclerc, who has surely just experienced both the funniest and most unhinged weekend a mother could ever have. Dear fucking christ, I hope your middlest son brought you a bottle of champagne for yourself, ma'am.

[timeisacephalopod]

The type of Christian who asks atheists how they don't like, murder people on the reg are so funny to me because they seem to think their religion makes them the Peak of Morality when statements like "if you don't believe in God how comes you don't do X thing" all but outright state they have no idea why shit like murder and rape is bad except that God doesn't like it lmao. Like way to admit you have no intrinsic sense of morality and need to be afraid of a higher power to be a decent person, but I promise if you're not a piece of shit it's actually very natural not to want to do heinous evil shit all the time potential punishment from a higher power or not 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️

[lord-squiggletits]

One of my least favorite parts of how JRO wrote Optimus is that he wanted so badly to continue his dark and gritty world building making the Autobots problematic, but evidently couldn't reconcile this with Optimus being a Heroic Paragon, so instead he leaned way too hard into "oh Prowl was the one who did this and it was behind Optimus' back" which if anything I think makes Optimus look worse, not better. Because then it's like, okay I know Optimus trusted Prowl a lot as his friend but you CANNOT TELL ME that over the course of 4 million years, Optimus as the leader of the Autobot army who literally would have access to 99.9% of all the records they produce, would never notice or question where some of these odd/inconsistent details were pointing. It just seems really inconsistent with how a real military would actually function, especially regarding Optimus' character, who is incredibly thorough and responsible and wouldn't neglect to keep up with all the details of his army.

Hell, Optimus knows who the Wreckers are and had them on call for tricky operations when he needed them (Stormbringer) so he's literally not at all ignorant of/averse to the use of special wartime units composed of dubious individuals. He's the fucking commander of an entire army, of course he knows that War Is Hell (TM) and no one's hands are clean. That's not even getting into all the stuff he got up to in phase 2/3, I mean everything from the annexation of Earth to OP breaking humans out of prison against Council orders shows that Optimus is no stranger to immoral and/or unlawful means.

It also leads to a lot of annoying fanon where people write Optimus (sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not) as like some sort of ignorant fool who's unaware of the machinations of his own army or has some sort of naiveté of "b-but we can't use bad tactics against the enemy! I would never condone the use of morally gray means in war!" No, IDW Optimus knows perfectly well all of the bullshit he's enacted/condoned for the sake of trying to win the war. Some stuff is definitely out of character for him and was only machinated because of Prowl, but I think this fandom REALLY underestimates Optimus' personal agency/responsibility as the commander of a whole ass army and ESPECIALLY underestimates Optimus' capacity to condone morally gray Bullshit Of War while still being a good person individually as well as, comparatively, the lesser evil compared to Megatron/the Decepticons.

Anyways what I'm saying is JRO may be a good writer but he's really hesitant to make Optimus morally gray and does some asspulls sometimes to justify most of the bad things the Autobots did as "Optimus just didn't know," and since the majority of the IDW1 fandom only reads JRO's stuff they go running with this premise of ignorant/uninformed Optimus when there's evidence elsewhere in canon to show that Optimus is, in fact, very highly aware of the bullshit he's allowed "for the greater good" and the only stuff he was "unaware of" was the stuff he would literally never agree to the ethics of, like bombing innocent neutrals disguised as Decepticons to get them to join the Autobots.

[todayisafridaynight]

whatever //blasts your old man with the butch beam//