READ ON AO3 • 3,025 / 7,671 WORDS

Useful posts on how to write comments for fanfics - [here] & [here]

On a personal note. I’ve met wonderful people throughout fandoms and by leaving comments. I’ve made great friends, some even on comment sections, as we shared our enthusiasm for the same story. 

People who like the same ships often hold similar character traits and life experiences; they’re people who would get you. The bonds in fandoms only strengthen when people meet other people as humans - and there are fantastic humans waiting to meet you. 

Leave a comment. :)

((Methodology For Data Collected

For this, I’ve used AO3, currently the most popular fanfiction website. 

I’ve taken the first ranked story in each ship, completed, rated by kudos - since bookmarks on AO3 can be set to private so the counters don’t reflect the real numbers - to reflect the stories that had the most positive feedback in their category.

For the comments, I’ve (falsely and intentionally) assumed the numbers represented are singular comments from singular, different users (tipping the scales in favor of the commenters). For Destiel, Johnlock and Spirk I had to pick the second story by kudos, since for the first the deviation error (assuming the author haven’t replied and there aren’t discussion threads included in the comments) was far too high for the ratio to be accurate, and my initial assumption couldn’t be applied. My apologies to the authors. 

The data was collected on May 2nd , 2016.))

derailed

gold on her head, pearls in her mouth, blood under her fingernails : a Fantine Lives playlist (listen on spotify)

welcome to the jungle guns n’ roses | die young ke$ha | are you gonna be my girl jet | funplex the b-52s | you give love a bad name bon jovi | everybody’s fool evanescence | monster (alternate radio edit) skillet | i miss the misery halestorm | dance with the devil breaking benjamin | animal i have become three days grace | uma thurman fall out boy | ballroom blitz the sweet | beat it (single) michael jackson | no one’s here to sleep naughty boy & bastille | secrets onerepublic | back in black ac/dc

noot noot! book of nile please <3

“Lover’s Wreck” - Gaelic Storm

In my sleeping mind she sings a sad and lonely lullaby

And when I wake, there’s just the ache that’ll haunt me ‘til I die

It’s been two days now since he woke from the first death that wasn’t his and wasn’t drowning. Two days, and he’ll never wake from it again, but he can remember it now, in Val d'Argent, as clearly as he did on the train in Sudan: the heat of blood spilling out, the sharp pain, and most of all the shock.

He remembers her looking up at her friend’s face and thinking Oh, this is it. I didn’t think it would be like this.

He remembers her thinking, I don’t want to go.

It reminds him of how his own first death went. Of how he had been so sure he would survive, and then the stomach-dropping realization that he wouldn’t.

And then, of course, he did. And now she has, too.

He doesn’t want to go to sleep again. It was easier in Goussainville, knowing that Merrick’s men were coming but not knowing Nile, not really. But now Merrick’s men have come and gone and taken Nicky and Joe with them, and Andy is being weird and quieter than normal, and Nile …

Nile.

She shines, is the thing. Booker has tried, but he can’t take his eyes off her.

Keep reading

You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

Stranger: tell me a story

You: once upon a time, there was a little boy who was born in a prison

Stranger: mmmhhmm go on

You: he grew up an outcast, rejected by everyone around him

You: the people who raised him taught him about the law, and how it was very important to follow the law and never ever break it

You: so when he grew up, he decided that there were two kinds of people that other people didn't like: criminals, and policemen

Stranger: ooooh ooh

You: and he decided to be a policeman because he wanted to follow the law

You: one day a convict broke parole, and the policeman chased him across the country

Stranger: omg then what:o

You: the convict took a new name, and the policeman tried as hard as he could - he searched everywhere - but he could not find the convict

You: seventeen years later, a revolution was brewing

You: the policeman went undercover to see if he could spy on the revolutionaries, but he got caught

Stranger: :O

You: the leader of the revolutionaries was going to kill him, but then a man stepped up and offered to do it himself

You: it was the convict from seventeen years ago

Stranger: WHAT

You: the convict took him into an alley, and took out a knife

You: and he cut the policeman's bonds, and told him that he was free to go

You: the policeman couldn't believe it. a convict is a convict is a convict, a bad person, who can never change. but this convict had showed him kindness

Stranger: :OOO

You: the policeman went about his duty, and when the revolution had been successfully squashed, he ran into the convict again. the convict had an injured man with him

You: the policeman told him that he was going to take him to jail, but the convict pleaded a few hours' time, so he could get the injured man back to his family

You: and against every instinct, the policeman let him go

You: he could not believe what he had done. on the one hand, he had broken the law that he had sworn to uphold. on the other hand, he had helped a good man do a good deed.

Stranger: wooooah

You: he wanted to go back and arrest the convict. but again: on the one hand, if he did so, he would be upholding the law, and on the other hand, he would be arresting a good man.

You: his entire world had been turned upside down

You: he realized that if a convict could be a good person, then there had probably been hundreds of good people he had unknowingly put in jail. his whole life had been a lie.

Stranger: omg

You: so he did the only thing he could do

You: or at least, the only thing he thought possible

You: he committed suicide

Stranger: WHAT?

You: that's right. he wrote a letter to the prefect of police, pointing out various corruptions in the system, and he went to a bridge overlooking the most dangerous part of the river, and, placing his hat on the edge of the bridge, he jumped

Stranger: did you just randomly make this up?

Stranger: thats some george orwell shit

You: no, actually. it's victor hugo

Stranger: ...

You: les misérables.

Stranger: fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Your conversational partner has disconnected.

@fantineweek 2018 - day one: youth | childhood.

going off the hapgood translation available online here.

She was born at M. sur M. Of what parents? Who can say? She had never known father or mother. She was called Fantine. Why Fantine? She had never borne any other name. At the epoch of her birth the Directory still existed. She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal name; the Church no longer existed. She bore the name which pleased the first random passer-by, who had encountered her, when a very small child, running bare-legged in the street. She received the name as she received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained. She was called little Fantine. No one knew more than that. This human creature had entered life in just this way. At the age of ten, Fantine quitted the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood. At fifteen she came to Paris “to seek her fortune.”

this is the only paragraph we have that describes anything of her youth. as far as hugo is concerned, her story begins in 1817, when she is 21 years old and two years a mother.

fantine, as in (en)fantine - childlike. the obvious connotation there is innocence.

it is pretty much implied that fantine grows up on the street much the same way that gavroche and the mômes did. and yet hugo spends so much time after this telling us how much she is naively in love with tholomyès; how young she is, how sweet this first love is, even if tholomyès does not requite it.

that naïveté might be solely attached to her romantic inclinations, though, i think.

fantine survives a childhood in the gutter. yet hugo only devotes two sentences (two! out of this enormous book, only two!) to her rise from gamine to grisette.

she is clever enough to realize that she will not be able to get anywhere in life if she stays where she is. hugo says she quits montreuil-sur-mer at the age of ten. ten years old. what on earth was i doing at the age of ten? pretending to be a gargoyle at recess? reading books about talking owls? fantine volunteered to work at a farm; she worked there for five years; and when she wanted more out of life, at the age of fifteen (only two years younger than cosette in 1832!) she walks to paris.

four years later she becomes a mother.

when we first see fantine in “double quartette” and “four and four”, she is young; she is quiet, prone to melancholy daydreaming; she is in love with tholomyès.

(side note: digging through “four and four” for quotes, i found this:

Listolier and Fameuil, who were engaged in discussing their professors, explained to Fantine the difference that existed between M. Delvincourt and M. Blondeau.

blondeau, that old rat! eleven years from now we’ll be hearing your funeral oration courtesy of bossuet! it’s little nuggets like these that keep me in love with this book, dammit.)

fantine wears fashionable if modest clothes, and hugo takes great care to describe not only the curve of her throat and the dimple between her shoulder (uh ... thanks, buddy) but the type of fabric that she wears, the particular color of the muslin, et cetera. fantine is a pieceworker at this point -- she clearly knows what she is doing, even if she is less coquettish about it than the other girls in the quartet. this gives us an inkling of what she spent her time doing from the age of fifteen onward. though, really, this is only a different venue for what she had been doing ever since she was ten.

she spent her time climbing up the ladder. she found a new skill, and she learned it, and she made herself useful. i don’t call that particularly naive.

she got out of the gutter, and the horrors that this entails. she made herself a comfortable life away from the constraints of what she was born into.

contrast this with the stories of valjean and javert:

valjean did not start in the gutter. he was forced into prison, and he was forced into the abyss that is being an ex-convict. only the grace of m. myriel allowed him to climb out of that pit -- not just his kindness, but his silver. ( “i have bought your soul for God.” )

javert started in the gutter, but unlike fantine -- let’s be honest here -- given the social and historical context in which hugo was writing, the terms with which he describes javert can easily be interpreted as javert being part romani -- javert does not have the same options to rise from his horrible circumstances. he has no miraculous donor to give him money. and he is not a blonde white girl.

so fantine and valjean get out. there is a catch; of course there is.

it is valjean’s history which is the pitfall waiting for him. as long as someone knows who he is, and will take advantage of it, he will always have the specter of the bagne lurking over him.

and fantine’s fate? well, by the time we meet her, as young as she still is (21! by God, she’s only twenty-one years old!), the trap has already been baited and set for her, and she’s already been caught in it. tholomyès has made her the mother of his child, but he has refused to make her his wife.

i don’t believe that fantine is so innocent she cannot comprehend it is only tholomyès’ whim which keeps her, an unmarried mother, out of the yawning abyss. i can’t believe it. she must have seen enough of life, both in paris and in m-sur-m before that, to know how society devours unmarried mothers.

i can, however, believe that it is her innocent love which blinds her to the fact that he is willing to condemn her to such despair.

Street rat… turned thief

“A lugubrious being was Montparnasse. Montparnasse was a child; less than twenty years of age, with a handsome face, lips like cherries, charming black hair, the brilliant light of springtime in his eyes; he had all vices and aspired to all crimes.

The digestion of evil aroused in him an appetite for worse. It was the street boy turned pickpocket, and a pickpocket turned garroter. He was genteel, effeminate, graceful, robust, sluggish, ferocious. The rim of his hat was curled up on the left side, in order to make room for a tuft of hair, after the style of 1829. He lived by robbery with violence. His coat was of the best cut, but threadbare. 

Montparnasse was a fashion-plate in misery and given to the commission of murders. The cause of all this youth’s crimes was the desire to be well-dressed. The first grisette who had said to him: “You are handsome!” had cast the stain of darkness into his heart, and had made a Cain of this Abel. Finding that he was handsome, he desired to be elegant: now, the height of elegance is idleness; idleness in a poor man means crime. Few prowlers were so dreaded as Montparnasse. At eighteen, he had already numerous corpses in his past. More than one passer-by lay with outstretched arms in the presence of this wretch, with his face in a pool of blood. Curled, pomaded, with laced waist, the hips of a woman, the bust of a Prussian officer, the murmur of admiration from the boulevard wenches surrounding him, his cravat knowingly tied, a bludgeon in his pocket, a flower in his buttonhole; such was this dandy of the sepulcher.”

1. I didn't say Javert wasn't poor, but it was decidedly better to be a policeman than a factory worker.

2. I don't think Fantine forgot how to live on nothing, what she had to learn was to keep up appearances of doing okay, which before working as a piecemaker she wouldn't have known.

Other than that I agree.

ngl i'm a bit puzzled here. if after being fired she needed to keep up the appearance of doing okay, doesn't that mean that before being fired, she had the substance of it as well?

also, and i realize this is subjective, but constant grinding misery without any relief at all doesn't mean anything. i'd prefer to think that fantine had a little sunlight before the storm clouds came back. maybe you don't think of working in a factory as a bright spot, but (meme voice) it's honest work. and for a little while, it took care of cosette. and those things are important to fantine, so i'll take it as a win.

that's all i got. have a good day man

Joly and Grantaire

It was a simple drive to out to town to get some food for dinner. Joly was working so Grantaire took Angelina with him. Everything happened to so fast after that.

Joly heard about a little girl with a broken from a car accident whose Father had thrown himself over the little girl. The young Doctor’s phone rang as a nurse made the call for to the dead man’s husbands. At this realization Joly ran to Angelina’s room, she was sleeping. As he moved closer Joly could see tear stains on her cheeks.

may have accidentally turned Sauron into Montparnasse or Heather Chandler. oh well.

proportions what are proportions

clothing reference here.

will probably experiment more with grayscale in the future.