random but i've been thinking about tcomc again and how i find it sort of disappointing that adpatations, when picking which conspirator to build up as edmond's ultimate adversary (which i sort of dislike in the first place tbh), always choose fernand, when if there is one that fits that role better it's villefort. usually mondego ends up as the more prominent of the enemies because he's the one with the most personal motivation, and ends up as mercédès' husband and albert's father. he's the one "closer" to edmond, being the one who somewhat "takes his place" in life, becoming the husband of his fiancée and the father of a son that mercédès says "should have been ours". plus, focusing on the love triangle is easy. but in the text of the novel, the conspirator who gets more space and is, in my opinion, a more definite foil to edmond, is villefort. edmond is arrested at his engagement/wedding party, villefort is picked up from his own engagement party to go interrogate him. both edmond and villefort are strongly motivated in life by their bonds with their respective fathers, though for wildly different reasons - and villefort keeps his disabled father in his home, while still resenting him, when edmond will never see his father again because villefort condemned him to protect his. both of them lose their first love, though in different ways. it's villefort's daughter edmond has to save from the mechanism he set in motion himself because his own surrogate son, maximilien, is in love with her. benedetto is villefort's son but spends some time believing his father is actually monte cristo. villefort's defeat is the only one that edmond (and the reader) doesn't enjoy, because inadvertently by destroying him he also causes the death of his innocent child, and that is what leads him to realise he may have gone too far. villefort ends up mad, when he'd hoped edmond would go insane in the chauteau d'if. and both of them of course have an intense and complex relationship with the concept of justice. and i could go on