So I’m Still Going Through Most Of This Blog, Archiving The Old Rp Stuff Offline And Deleting The Posts

so, uh, hello Les Mis fandom! I’m putting this in the tags in the hopes that people might be interested?

I’m writing a fic called Climbing to the Light.

it’s an AU set in Beauxbatons during the 1970s – essentially it follows Valjean, Fantine, and Javert as students & young adults in France, during the rise & eventual (first) fall of Voldemort

it’s unfinished right now, and will probably be a great sprawling hulk of a fic when I’m done, but should be updating at least once a week so that’s exciting!

(involves eventual Valjean/Javert, Fantine/Javert, and trio – be warned)

(there’ll be a sequel about Cosette & Marius & Eponine & the Amis, set in Beauxbatons during the same timeline as the Harry Potter series, but that’s going to be waay in the future)

rereading the resurgam trilogy and I still can’t get over the fact that my undead ot3 is actually canon

it’s not fantine week anymore but that doesn’t mean i’m not eternally thinking about fantine so *fingerguns* here we go.

“i only understand love and liberty” is something that grantaire says but it might as well be fantine’s motto too because let’s be real here, these people come at it from different directions but they come to the same conclusion.

big old ramble under the cut.

grantaire is a student, or a former student by the time 1832 rolls around; he’s bossuet’s age, which i think comes to 4 years older than enjolras, which puts him at a solid age 30 at the barricade, 26 when marius meets the ensemble at the musain. in his debut, which is to say his introduction in a scene versus a description by hugo, he gives a grand declamation which takes up over five pages. i tried reading the whole thing in french and my eyes glazed over; in english it’s little better, if more decipherable since it’s my native language. friends, grantaire is verbose. but we can gather a few things from his long-ass rant:

that he apprenticed under gros, a painter of the time, and stole the apples he was supposed to have been drawing from still life (presumably ate them too). what we can take from this is that he is from a wealthy enough family to devote his time to learning how to paint, rather than a trade, e.g. feuilly.

that he believes virtue can easily turn into vice, saying almost the same thing in dialogue as a throwaway line that hugo said in description about javert when he got his terrible st michael on while arresting valjean in m-sur-m. (he also, in a single throwaway line -- the hapgood translation is “a bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous than the asp and the cobra” -- sums up fantine’s entire awful fate.)

that he is probably not an atheist, but definitely isn’t on board with the idea of an all-knowing all-powerful all-merciful god.

that a big part of why he believes this is because he sees how the world suffers. he has studied history and sees the way it repeats itself; he gives several classical examples and compares them to the contemporary history of his day. he also gives a statistic (how accurate it is i couldn’t tell you) about the number of deaths from hunger in a single neighborhood of london. he uses this as a reason to condemn all of england.

in short: grantaire is a skeptic, yes, but as the saying goes: a skeptic is only a bitterly disappointed optimist.

grantaire does not believe in the revolution because he does not think humankind has the ability to rise from its present miserable condition, and he does not think it has the will to rise from that condition either.

(at this point in time, he’s wrong about the first part, but tragically right about the second. and it’s the second one that’s the kicker.)

fantine was a gamine and a grisette. she was as musichetta is; the difference is that joly probably would actually marry musichetta, and we all know how tholomyès worked out for fantine. (poorly.) fantine was a gutter kid, who worked for her living. given an alt canon where she survives 1823 and makes it to paris with valjean and cosette (age 36 at the barricade), we can assume the following:

that while she has a comfortable place in the fauchelevent household, she will probably still be doing much of the sewing and upkeep; louison would likely take a much smaller role. she can teach cosette about coquetry and fashion, she can show cosette a little about upper society, but she cannot be part of that society any longer. she is masquerading as the shy retiring wife to a shy retiring man. theater, the arts, et cetera, these are all faded memories carefully preserved in her mind. any indulgences the fauchelevents take are pretty much relegated to walks in the luxembourg gardens.

that she has been through hell and back, and knows intrinsically both the good and the evil that every man is capable of. jean valjean in particular encapsulates this: when she knew him as mayor madeleine, he was both an angel and the very devil. so the inherent goodness of man is a complicated thing for her. perhaps some people are simply born wicked, but certainly some have wickedness thrust upon them. (yes, i know that’s from wicked, yes, i know the original shakespeare quote is a dick joke, yes, i got it, yes, grantaire would laugh his ass off at this, yes. however. still kinda true.)

that even after going through the worst hell a human can imagine, she still believes not only that there is a god but that he is good. we know this in particular because there is a bit of dialogue when she is in the hospital where she is planning what sort of confirmation dress little cosette is going to wear.

that seeing students on the street talking of barricades and rebellion would make her hackles rise like those of a cornered wolf. fantine was born in 1796, just two years after the reign of terror ended. she grew up watching napoleon’s rise to power, she grew up watching the wars, she was a young woman for the bourbon restoration. she knows what revolutions do: she is a product of one. we can reasonably extrapolate from hugo’s introduction of her character that the revolution is why she has no family and why she grew up as a gutter kid, but again: she grew up watching everything.

so fantine knows, has known from birth, how unfair the world is.

does she want the world to be better? well, sure. but while she knows that individuals can change for the better, she also knows from experience that The People generally don’t.

grantaire and fantine having a conversation about belief and revolution would be an interesting one, i think.

... and now i want to write a fic about it. damn it.

READ ON AO3 • 3,220 / 17,493 WORDS

"Okay, let's go steal the Magisterium."

~

leverage s3 & his dark materials s1 ; alec hardison/parker/eliot spencer ; multichapter ; rated T.

part five: in which the threads intersect.

everybody is talking about that theon and sansa moment during the song and yeah it’s cute but why are we sleeping on the significance of sansa, the lady of winterfell who every northerner appears to respect considerably, eating the same thing in the same place as the smallfolk?

she’s not handing out bread to win them over as margaery did, she’s not eating more than necessary like cersei did, and she clearly understands the importance of food accessibility during the winter unlike daenerys. sansa organised a food train, sansa organised enough rations to at least temporarily feed thousands of people and kept the doors open prepared to take on more. sansa is out there on the ground along with all of jon’s people emphasising the importance of sticking together regardless of titles or loyalties.

[Em will write something.]

Modern Les Amis AU : Combeferre/Joly

So you just need to breathe/To feel my heart against yours now, against yours now

Casual reminder about Javert, published 1841 in ‘Pictures of the French’ by J. G. Janin.

No shiny uniforms, ponies, or hordes of obedient underlings there.

france: ten

france: twenty

france: thirty

france: forty

france: fifty

france: sixty

france:

france:

france: sixty ten

world: france what are you do—

france: four twenties

world: france stop it

france: four twenties ten

world: france that doesn't even make any sense

france:

france:

france:

world:

france:

world:

france: hundred.