part 369 prohibition cocktails

[aphanon_meme]

Meme, you did it! And on Christmas, too!! How fancy. How was your year? It's almost the new year and I don't know about anyone else, but I'm excited to enter the 20s. We can finally bring back some excellent slang, like "That sounds berries to me!" or "I guess I'd describe myself as a cancelled stamp." Have a good year... and don't take any wooden nickels!

Enjoy part 369!

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Comments

Re: Les Miserables!

[(Anonymous)]

Anon what a beautiful comment adsfads

I definitely see what you mean about Valjean and pious self-denial. I get that type of impression from him in other respects (and in regards to, at least in certain media, how he treats Cosette and expects her to maintain that same piousness although I am also blending my Valjean + Cosette dynamic with a bit of Judge Turpin + Johanna, without the creepiness but with the gilded cage aspect).

On that note, what do you think about Valjean and Cosette? Not as a ship, but, just dynamic wise.


Also there is (surprisingly?) quite a bit of well written kinky fic with them. I mean. Vindictive policeman x saintly fugitive...

Oh? I don't know if I believe you. I will have to examine the evidence. Please provide it.

I don't really ship anything from Les Mis, but I do love the story. At its core I love the idea of Valjean going through this extensive, dramatic, nearly decades-long redemptive process. And I do love the dynamic he has with Javert, especially towards the end, with Javert just being so... uncomprehending of who Valjean is or how he can be the way that he is.

I like the musical! I also like most of the film/tv adaptations for what they are, even though they naturally remove a lot of the story.

The film adaptation of the musical is..... what it is aha. One thing I did love from the film was the decision to have the priest at the end rather than Eponine because god, that still makes no sense. What are you doing there Eponine?? Stop. Stop.

Though I dislike how the film musical adaptation didn't abide by the original Hooper script that leaked a while before the movie. I don't know if you've seen the movie, but the finale in the film is like... vague... heaven-but-not in the Paris street? just all the characters there, singing, not really anything in particular.

In the original script, only the alive characters were meant to truly appear, and it was supposed to take place during the French Revolution of 1848 aka the last revolution that overthrew the final french monarchy. Aka the chains were finally, at least in terms of what the students imagined, broken! The dead characters were supposed to appear, briefly, as ghost glimpses in the crowd.

The teenager in me will always love Eponine, but now that I'm older I love Javert so much.

Many a time did I watch the 10th anniversary concert and pretend I was playing Eponine on the stage, tho.

Re: Les Miserables!

[(Anonymous)]

Omg I'm sorry I'm tldring all over you anon but uh apparently I have a boatload of Cosette & Valjean feelings /o\

It's true it's a gilded cage - but, Valjean himself lives in an iron cage of sorts: that is how he understands morality, and that's also how people of his/Hugo's time would've understood it. (Catholic Guilt: The Musical!) Exit that cage, and hello nice to meet you DAMNATION.

Of course, Valjean's revolutionary idea is that after falling out you can still climb back into said righteous cage - albeit with extreme god-loving/fearing humility and continual willingness to destroy yourself in every way to uphold those bars.

I don't want to cast this cage metaphor in too negative of a light since obviously no morality - nor civilization itself - could exist without some degree of restraint; absolute freedom is simply amoral chaos. But, I do think 19th century religious morality demanded a greater level of self-subjugation to God than we would find normal or healthy in 2020.

And then on top of that, Valjean's going even further than normal for his time because he's only able to free himself from the shackles of the law (which he rejects as a flawed moral authority) by placing himself in the far stronger shackles of God (the ultimate moral authority) with the implication that without this submission he'd return to his greatest fear: the hate-filled, bestial, dehumanized 24601.

To my mind, Valjean's love for Cosette is of course pure and true and the heart of the story, but it's also a Moral Imperative, a godly righteous mission. And Valjean's not only a man on a mission but a man who desperately needs a mission and cannot live without one. Thus the Valvert fanfic trope which almost always grows the ship from first turning Javert into another Moral Imperative.

But Valjean/God is the canon OTP and God is not a gentle bf. From Valjean's perspective, his life is this series of trials from God that he's not always measured up to:

1) Myriel & candlesticks: fail
2) Petit Gervais & coin: FAIL
3) Champmathieu: ...pass but only barely
4) Fantine: fail*
5) Cosette:

...and so he interprets passing the Cosette test as necessarily sacrificing himself for her happiness, just as he needed to sacrifice himself to save Champmathieu. Even though in fact this is absurd, unnecessary, and the opposite of what Cosette needs or wants, it does make a sort of sense through Valjean Logic, which is to say the logic of a traumatized and damaged person desperately trying to make sense of that trauma and give damage meaning and believe that the God who keeps screwing up his life is actually really definitely doing it for his own good.

I think I could also make a case that raising Cosette serves as an excuse for Valjean to keep himself out of jail and to live a relatively comfortable ordinary life, just as the good of his employees/his town was almost but not quiet sufficient excuse to let Champmathieu take his place in jail and keep living his privileged mayoral life. I mean, not that one should need an excuse to evade prison on freaking BREAD THEFT charges (when there isn't a Champmathieu situation anymore), but Valjean Logic.

So, the (perceived) end of Cosette's need, the end of the Cosette trial and the Cosette mission, is also... the end of Valjean.

Which I guess is Valjean's tragedy of moral rigidity. Less extreme than Javert's, of course, but still: if only Valjean had allowed a little more breathing room in his self-imposed iron cage, if only happiness itself was sufficient justification for him, he could've had a fully happy ending with happy Cosette and happy Marius and probably another decade or so of life with happy grandkids and IT WOULD'VE BEEN FINE GDI VALJEAN.

*Fantine's fate is not directly his fault, but to Valjean that's probably about as comforting as saying his 19 years of slavery isn't [insert authority figure]'s fault. He was trying to fix society's ills from the top, and this example showed that he couldn't, and combined with the Javert and Champmathieu situation coming to a head all at the same time it could easily read as God saying it's sin of pride to even think he could.



...oh dear that was long. Er. Anyway, that said, I personally find Cosette and Marius somewhat bland as characters, and mostly interesting only in context of their impact on Valjean and Eponine respectively. Perhaps there's more to them in the full novel though.

It's been a looong time since I saw the movie, I don't even remember the epilogue scene. I agree with you though, I think the ending you described makes more sense! I mean the advantage of a movie is you have the realistic sets and special effects to do stuff like that instead of just spotlights on Vague Death Stage Space.

I really want to dig up a bootleg of the Dallas Les Miserables, which is apparently a modern day/dystopian near-future AU. (And for some reason chose to make Javert's uniform entirely black leather. Which I think is supposed to read "fascist" but actually screams "fetish"...and has made for some excellent fic)

I would've chosen Eponine over Cosette! Marius you fool, don't you see SHE HAS THE BETTER SONGS ...though that would've been a Thenardier shitstorm and a half, wouldn't it?

I think younger me loved Fantine best because favorite song (+ MOST ANGST) but I also recall shipping Enjolras/Grantaire and revisiting that ship now, unfortunately I'm just...bored by the fanfic. I feel like these characters are much more complicated and challenging than their one-note true love fanon is.

On the other hand, I never thought of Javert/Valjean back in the day, but upon looking for fanfic now I find this pairing has the best fics imo. I also appreciate Javert more as a character now I'm older and life experience has shown me that it's unfortunately very easy for people to lock themselves into Javert Logic. And even more so back in the 1800s, of course.

As for recs:

https://archiveofourown.org/users/Esteliel
My biggest rec, there's sooo much good fic here. I love pretty much everything of hers and she's written a ton for this fandom, from kinky idfic to gentle romance. Currently reading her completed novel-length slavefic (https://archiveofourown.org/works/6932542/)... after finishing all available chapters from her currently ongoing slavefic haha.

https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliceB132/

https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/

https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellamason/
Note, most of this author's fic is set to be visible only to AO3 users, you'll need to log in.