The First Time They Kissed Was Completely By Accident.

The spread of the black death.

Sometimes I just sit and think about how Aziraphale and Crowley spent several years giving some ordinary human kid THE weirdest possible upbringing of all time.

0______o

That….is sick

I made this thing! Colors based on the crests, houses, people, places and events relevant to our team (although feel free to use them for other characters) c:

I.. wanted to draw Bahorel wearing that vest [x] and I don’t know what happened.

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.

So I’m still going through most of this blog, archiving the old rp stuff offline and deleting the posts themselves. If anybody who I used to rp with here (when this blog was still called ask-the-hypochondriac) wants any of those screenshots, you are more than welcome to contact me and I’ll send copies of them to you.

But yeah, if anybody’s been paying attention to the change in url, this is now gonna be my fic and sketch blog. So I’m going to be rebageling drabbles and fics from my other rp blogs here, dumping original stuff here, posting sketches, that kind of thing. Probably mostly going to be centered on LOTR and the Silmarillion since that’s mostly the fandom I’m in right now.

salt about les mis bbc under the cut.

okay. i just gotta say, regarding the gifset where lily collins and david oyewolo are talking about the part where he as javert throws her as fantine to the ground. she lands badly, but she winces and continues acting in character, and the camera cuts away from him which is good because he’s horrified that he actually did throw her to the ground.

here’s the thing.

that was a little accident, right? that was an organic scene that happened between two actors.

pinches bridge of nose.

sighs.

theater is organic, because it is new every night. actors get sick and react differently to their understudies than the leads; the audience is particularly receptive or not receptive; maybe there’s a tech fail, or someone forgets to come onstage at the right cue; maybe someone accidentally falls into a trash can and ad libs the rest of a soliloquy from that new vantage point. the actors’ choices matter, but it is a live thing, so each person’s choices interact with things outside their control every single time. theater lives. it breathes. so do live concerts for orchestra, for singers, for comedians.

but nothing in film is organic, just like nothing in writing is organic.

these are created things, set in amber, preserved. these are not alive the same way that theater or concerts are.

there is a choice behind every movement. every element -- the lighting, the costumes, the sound, down to the last flicker of film and the last byte of noise, everything you experience in a film is something that someone decided specifically to do. it is a curated experience. it is inorganic. it is manufactured.

does that mean film is worse than theater? duh, no it doesn’t. but what it does mean is that you look at it for what it is: a series of choices carefully selected.

the accident of david throwing lily to the ground -- which, as we see in the gifset, he very clearly did not mean to do! -- existed organically.

but they had been doing a couple takes of it, as far as i can glean from the gifset. so there were multiple takes to choose from, including that one.

the director chose that one specifically.

this action happened organically, but it does not exist in the bbc miniseries organically, because -- i cannot repeat it enough -- the miniseries is a filmed entity, a manufactured thing, a made thing which consists solely of decisions within the creators’ control.

when i scream “WHY DID THIS HAPPEN” at my computer (or in the tags of a gifset), i am not screaming it at the actors. i am screaming at the director, who chose for this organic moment caught on camera to be part of the manufactured scene that happens in the tv show.

“jenny of oldstones” of game of thrones and “edge of night” of lord of the rings are as yet incomparable because we haven’t seen the final episode of GoT yet. we haven’t even seen the big battle at winterfell which is going to be comparable (narrative-wise at least) to the battle of gondor against the nazgul. (i could go into comparisons with the white walkers vs the nazgul, the night king vs sauron, but as i haven’t actually read asoiaf and honestly don’t intend to i don’t think i’m qualified on that account.) but in any case, “edge of night” has lyrics which are juxtaposed between denethor eating and clearly uncaring of his son’s plight and the riders galloping valiantly to their fates, while “jenny of oldstones” is essentially a montage of all the faces of the people who are going to either die or lose their loved ones, peacefully or at least calmly contemplating their coming fates. and this is a contrast that we can look at in and of itself but until we have the entire completed oeuvre that is game of thrones, we can’t say for certain that “and she never wanted to leave” (in the context of jenny dancing with her ghosts) will have the same effect on GoT’s serial narrative as “all shall fade” (in the context of shadow and clouds fading) has on LOTR as a trilogy, and until we see who lives and who dies and what the ultimate outcome of the series is, we cannot properly compare these two sequences. in this essay i will

Scarf?

Scarf: Your character or mine borrowing/stealing clothes from the other

|| The record shows that shiptastic fluff was asked for. Let the record show also that shiptastic fluff was delivered.

50’s housewife Alliance AU, which may be explained here and here.

—

Usually they just shrugged and tallied up how many times each had been the one to wear the dress. Two men living together had a tendency to get awkward questions in these times, and it was easier to pose as husband and wife than to constantly give the tired half-lie of childhood friends; and while they were tethered to hröar rather than fanar, both were sufficiently androgynous that they could pass as male or female. It was only fair to take turns.

But for spending one day in a new city, with no plans to return anytime soon, Sauron had absolutely no qualms about nicking Langon’s new dress.

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