a niche character trope i like is the person who is nice, a good person and acts well adjusted, then they do something where it’s like. oh you’re secretly a little bit insane actually
Beginning a Grantaire playlist, which will probably be mostly drunken Irish music, to be honest. I feel like it needs some punk rock too, but I don’t actually know any punk rock songs. Suggestions welcome! For any genre.
Guys, what kind of music would Grantaire listen to? I need some variety.
[ID: two digital portraits of Javert from Les Miserables, drawn from the shoulders up. Both are the same, but the first image is in black and white and the second is in color. Javert is facing our right and looking at the viewer. He is scowling. His loose curls are tied back, and there are slight scars on his face. End ID.]
@everyonewasabird I am equally confused about the layout of these streets. I tried to use this Visualizing Les Miserables thing but the map’s legend is unfortunately directly on top of the streets we need.
Here’s my confused attempts at mapping these streets:
I really had a time trying to figure how something could be Y-shaped and also have right angles. I’m just so confused.
It seems as though the street corner that Valjean is standing at has a blunt end, like my drawing in the top right corner. But I still can’t figure out how everything is laid out. I wish Hugo had done the fantasy author thing and supplied little drawings. I know Hugo did a number of little character doodles in his manuscripts, I wonder if there are street doodles too.
Hugo is really hammering home Javert’s height in this section the way he hasn’t before. He seems much taller than before. Is this a sort of symbolic magic? He has the upper hand here and the power, and therefore he becomes so much taller in a way that he wasn’t when he was just a humble policeman in M-sur-M? In Fantine’s room he was monstrous and wolf-like but he wasn’t towering. Or is he unnaturally tall the way Valjean is unnaturally strong?
15 minutes is a weirdly long time? I mean it’s a short period of time but it’s a weirdly long amount of time for a group of people to be searching for someone? I suppose they know they have Valjean surrounded and therefore are willing to take their time. But it just seems odd to me that Javert and his gendarmes aren’t spreading out and instead are working as a unit, making stops that mean it will take them 15 whole minutes to make it to Valjean’s hiding place. A similar thing happens in the sewers.
“And prison now was no longer simply prison; it was Cosette lost forever–a living death.” Valjean’s original sentence was heartbreaking and horrible because he had tried so hard to care for his sister’s family. And yet he had not felt the depth of love for those children (despite the gesture as his chains were put on) that he has developed for Cosette. I think his return to prison, his return to the Orion was a horrible, re-traumatizing experience, but it was sort of “simply prison.” He had made a promise to Fantine but he kind of knew the entire time that he was going to try and escape at some point and help Cosette. We know this because he went to the trouble of escaping the jail and burying his money and trying to get to Montfermeil. But going to prison now would be devastating in a completely different way. Cosette has helped bring Valjean back to life, has reshaped his heart and his morals and his ways of thinking. He’s never been this close to another human being. Losing her wouldn’t just be going back to prison, I think it would break him completely. I think it would push him even deeper than the depths that he had reached before Myriel bought his soul for god.
Okay well this description of Valjean climbing the right-angle of a wall confuses me even more re: the construction of the streets and houses. My kingdom for a map.
“The whole strength of a man is necessary to accomplish these strange assents.” I love this as a metaphorical line as well.
Hugo mentions that Valjean has two “knapsacks,” one of a saint and one of an ex-convict, which he picks from as he sees fit. He is almost fully in the ex-convict mindset here. He chooses a really awful way to keep Cosette quiet, because it’s also the quickest. He has no time explain what’s going on or why Cosette must be silent. Threatening her with the Thenardiess is the easiest way but it’s mean. At least he tempers it by saying he’ll make sure Cosette doesn’t get hurt.
I don’t know if Hugo did this on purpose, but I think Valjean ties Cosette in the same way that the Conventionist describes Cartouche’s brother being hung in the Place de Greve.
And Valjean escapes with just a hair’s breadth of safety. Cosette’s hands are a bit scraped. Did she put her hands out instinctively because she was scared? Or was she trying to help.
I had a realization too that I wonder if the description of these streets, despite Hugo’s insistence that they’re exact, is deliberately confusing and strange. So much of his descriptions of Paris are also wrapped up in discussions of progress and modernity and visibility. This is a section of Paris that no longer exists (and in the real world never existed at all), which means Hugo gets to describe it however he wants. And old streets are strange, irregular, twisting, morphing things. Hugo gets to remove all modernity and progress from this section of streets, turning it back into its medieval knot of weirdness, the same way that the convent itself kind of throws everything back into the past and avoids progress. And this is another moment of providence: Valjean puts his faith in god, goes blindly, and god leads him to the church. These streets might be mysterious and confusing because there’s a sort of miracle or magic happening, the convent kind of blooming before Valjean as a miraculous sanctuary in the center of this knot of danger.
Grantaire gets a troath infection and cannot talk for a while, but this doesn’t stop him from arguing with Enjolras, like he would give him this look and Enjolras would stop mid-rant to scream at him and tell him that “how can you even think something like that-” and Grantaire would tilt his head and blink and Enjolras’s would groan and start talking even more fast until Grantaire just crosses his arms and raises one eyebrow and Enjolras just- throws his hands in the air and turns around groan about how insufferable Grantaire is being, everything under the amusement of all the amis, Ponine got it on video and Jean are fawning because it’s so romantic that they can still understand each other like that-
Do you have any Enjolras and Feuilly friendship headcanons? I love them
Answer:
I have this vivid imagine of Enjolras spending his time on Feuilly’s shoulders like he’s his tiny backpack because Feuilly’s so tall and he just- climbs him and starts shouting from his shoulders, moving left and right because he trusts him not to make him fall.
Enjolras had had all of his worst brain-freezes with Feuilly. The man has a thing for ice cream and Enjolras has a killer sweet-tooth. What did you expect.
That time Feuilly fell and crushed him and almost sent him to the hospital.
That time they got drunk and Enjolras dyed Feuilly’s hair, and the next morning he was the one desperate because oh no your beautiful hair, but Feuilly quite liked them.
They have friendship bracelets and Courf pouts at them when he finds out.
It’s Feuilly that gives Enjolras the chance to flirt with Grantaire the first time. Then spends half an hour laughing at him because Enjolras short-circuit the moment he sees Grantaire at the gym. He’s still plotting his revenge.
That time they woke up in a barn, along with Grantaire and Bossuet, with no explanation on how they ended there. Enjolras blamed them but he has half a memory of messing with the map on his phone.
in average
are photos
are videos
are texts
are gifs
are audio