The Fact That Hyde Is Short Because Jekyll Didnt Let Him Grow. That Hyde Is Rail-thin And Underdeveloped

Jekyll and Hyde looks like a typical character vs own dark impulses gothic tale but it’s actually a very biting psychological horror story centered around the loss of identity and mental illness as a form of death.

Lanyon gives up on life after witnessing something he believes to be impossible (and that he even doubts was real), and only physically dies after he’s been left a husk of himself. Jekyll gradually loses the grip on reality and eventually dissociates to the point he can’t even see himself in his own fabricated identity, and only physically dies after he loses most of his personality and sense of self.

For all the waxing about these two being scared of death, they experienced it while they were still alive, and what ultimately died were the closest thing to an empty shell of a body you can get in a semi-realistic setting. Both characters‘ ultimate fate is underlined by a passage in which Jekyll describes himself dissociating after telling Lanyon the truth. As much as one believes and the other doesn’t, both are left traumatized by something that, in real life, is impossible.

It has been argued that rather than good vs evil the book touches on repression vs indulgence but I think it also has a layer of reality vs unreality. By the end of Henry’s narration, we don’t quite know how much of it was true and how much of it was lies or delusions. Either way, the main conflict in the last chapter isn’t one of man vs man, but rather man vs self, man vs perception, man vs mental decay, and not in a traditional “darkness inside” way but in one that is deliberately similar to real life struggles with addiction and psychosis.

low empathy henry jekyll. low empathy jekyll who always shows compassion and kindness because he chooses to. low empathy jekyll with a very strong moral code. low empathy jekyll seeing empathy as a performance and a duty (one that he must excel in, as in all things). low empathy jekyll who knows how society expects him to feel and on most good days can half-convince himself he genuinely does. low empathy jekyll thinking there’s something inherently wrong with him. low empathy jekyll thinking he can cut the bad parts out. low empathy jekyll becoming hyde, who is much the same, but has no morals, logic, societal expectation, or interpersonal connection to make him behave kindly. low empathy henry jekyll/edward hyde.

henry jekyll & edward hyde // @screenshotsofdespair​

Hiii I am soo normal doctor don’t mind my mental breakdown decor (drawing based on the song Streak of Madness from the musical)

I will forever hold the belief that Ford said “Grammar, Stanley.” as a sort of revenge for making him say “Thank you.” in front of everybody.

🦋👁️

the book of bill all but spells out that ford's "ego" is a front he uses to overcompensate for a fucked-up smorgasbord of self-esteem issues and insecurities and people will still post shit like "ford is so inhumanly selfish he totally didn't even care about the apocalypse plot, he was only upset about bill's betrayal because it meant he wasn't as special and perfect as he thought"

but anyway to make a larger point here the problem with the interpretation that ford is just a horrible person is that it actually causes a lot of his actions to not make any sense.

like, why is he thinking "i'm sorry fiddleford" when he hasn't seen or heard from fiddleford in three decades? why does he invite stan to play d&d&md with him? in lost legends, why did he try so hard to help stan prove his innocence? in college, why did he immediately stand up for fiddleford, who was at this time a stranger to him? why did he try to make friends in gravity falls at first? why did he try to protect those kids from the krampus? why did he rage against the northwest family after finding out what they did?

multiple different interpretations of a story can be valid but like, the franchise canon has repeatedly shown that ford will be kind and principled in situations where he stands to gain absolutely nothing from it. if he really is so deeply selfish and egocentric that he would willingly and knowingly bring about an apocalypse just so he can be "special," WHY would he do that?

every "ford is a bad person" argument absolutely falls apart under scrutiny because of the sheer amount of cherry-picking and mental gymnastics you have to do to reach that conclusion.

Thinking about the birth imagery and pregnancy horror themes in Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde. How they’re going on opposite directions.

Frankenstein desiring to “birth” through unnatural ways out of spite, out of a need to prove a point. Jekyll being forced to continuously “birth” and simultaneously ”be birthed” as the aftermath of a choice which was to indeed birth the separation of good and evil.

Frankenstein creating an unnatural person, designed and expected to be perfect, through an unnatural conception with no pregnancy. Jekyll becoming an unnatural person that was never conceived, unwittingly made perfectly monstrous, through a process that is described as painful, something being ejected from his subconscious like a womb.

Frankenstein makes the perfect male body which is described as “wrong-looking”, Jekyll gives himself a “wrong”-looking male body which comes with a “wrong” mind to pair.

Creation = pregnancy and birth. Mad scientists are often characterized as fathers, being mostly men- but they’re still being the mother or taking such a role since the creation on itself is their doing- as life, or a distortion of it, or a perversión of its laws, an impossible thing is what they make.

And what more perverted an impossible -in the eyes of cishet society- than a male pregnancy?

One man wants pregnancy, dreams of it- wishes to attain it even though he knows it is impossible and suffers the consequence when a “pregnancy” with no woman ends badly, because he just wishes so; the other fears becoming pregnant, comparing the distress he suffers as he transforms as the “horror of childbirth”, as if he knew, as if he knew what it is like or felt it could be possible after all. Bodies. “Perfect” bodies, “wrong” bodies, pregnancies that end badly, men being metaphorically pregnant. I don’t know what it all could mean, frankly.

I don’t know.

Dr Jekyll voice hey sorry for roping you into my horrors those were meant for my eyes and my eyes only

This is something that only comes up briefly twice in the final statement, but it would be interesting to discuss what ideas everyone has about Jekyll's father and their relationship based on those lines.

The first mention of his father is when he has changed back into Jekyll after murdering Sir Danvers —

The pangs of transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll, with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of self-indulgence was rent from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole: I followed it up from the days of childhood, when I had walked with my father’s hand, and through the self-denying toils of my professional life, to arrive again and again, with the same sense of unreality, at the damned horrors of the evening.

The next reference is during his final days as Hyde engages in destructive behaviour, which Jekyll describes as if Hyde is a separate entity who hates and harms him —

His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin.

There's a lot of room for interpretation, as it's very little information to work off, but my personal reading is that Jekyll had a complicated relationship with his father where he loved and adored him as a child, but his father may also have played a role in his repression and perfectionism - the childhood moment is evoked both as a starting point of life in the context of the horrors and alongside memories of self-denial in adulthood - that led to his choosing to turn into Hyde and everything that followed; so when Hyde destroys the portrait, it's both Jekyll's unrestrained self lashing out at his dead father and a form of self-harm borne out of self-hatred perceived as Hyde hating Jekyll for resenting him.