You Won't Fucking Believe This

top 3 worst frankenstein takes:

"frankenstein is the REAL monster". boring, hackneyed, overdone

"mary shelley wrote this just to get away from lord byron" embarassingly wrong, read anything at all she wrote about him to be immediately disproven

transphobia, somehow

this is what waltonstein is to me

My version of Victor Frankenstein

Extra art with Victor and his brothers

my intended response to this was never “caroline and alphonse fucked up as parents and therefore THEYRE the evil ones and to blame”—analysis is not about figuring out who the bad-est person is so you can disavow them and who the good-est person is so you can root for them. frankenstein is a complex story that deals with a lot of commentary on society and morality and the cycle of abuse. people are a reflection of their world, their life experiences and trauma, and caroline and alphonse are no exception. while caroline perpetuated her own abuse and trauma through victor and elizabeth, and its significant that victor made the (unconscious) choice to break this generational cycle of abuse, her origin story is still one where she was victimized herself, both by alphonse and by the society that failed her and her father as a whole. we also have to remember frankenstein was written in the past when people believed and acted in ways we would consider problematic now. the characters morality should be judged based on a reflection of that time period, not based wholly through a modern lens. in some ways (particularly through their method of educating their children, but also victor’s ideas on female autonomy) the frankensteins would have been considered rather radical, because parts of the book reflect mary shelley’s beliefs, who was a radical feminist herself. this isnt at all to say i absolve alphonse and caroline (or even victor, to a lesser extent) of blame for the mistakes they made in their parenting: rather, it’s a calling to consider the nuances of the book and the complexities of ALL of its characters instead of boiling them down to black-and-white good-versus-evil.

i’ve seen the “monsters aren’t born they’re created” line of reasoning applied quite a few times in defense of the creature, wherein creature was inherently good-hearted but turned into a monster via victor’s “abandonment” and his subsequent abusive treatment by other humans, but this logic is so scarcely applied to victor. victor, to me, is often sympathetic for the same reasons as the creature, it’s just those reasons are not as blatantly obvious and require reading in-between the lines of victor’s narration a bit more. most “victor was evil and bad” or even some “victor was unsympathetic” arguments tend to fall through when you flip the same premise onto victor: if monsters are created, than who created victor frankenstein?

a little Frankenstein and Clerval update

they call me the responsibility ignorer. for no discernible reason.

walton is a stronger man than me because if i found the man who was the culmination of my lifelong dreams of true connection and everything i could possibly want in a friend, who talked to me about my interests at length and encouraged me and told me i would be successful in my endeavors, who wept for me after i confided my deepest desires and ambitions to him, who used the language of my heart, who sympathized with and loved me, and who told me all of his greatest flaws and mistakes and his harrowing several-hundred-pages long life story including the murders of his entire family, upon which i treated him with nothing but understanding and kindness and would do anything to return him to happiness and shoulder his woes, all while tenderly nursing back him from the brink of death while expecting nothing in return, even despite my growing concerns of a mutiny going on, and after all this he told me "I thank you, Walton [...] but think you that any can replace those who are gone? Can any man be to me as Clerval was?" i would just walk off the boat

some doodles. robert walton my best friend robert walton.

victor “i'm not mad i'm not a madman please believe me" frankenstein and his constant assertions that he’s not insane throughout the whole novel only to become the foundation for the mad scientist trope. puts head in hands

For the last time: Mary Shelley and Lord Byron were friends. She didn't hate him. His death was a very painful loss to her. She didn't write Frankenstein because she was stuck in a house with him and he was an unbearable person. For God's sake, just read her journals and letters.