Utterson: I Incline To Cain’s Heresy; I Let My Brother Go To The Devil In His Own Way.

"If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also."

— Dr. Jekyll, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

I love how there were (and are -_- ) ppl who interpret(ed) Stanford’s eagerness to sacrifice himself as him just wanting to Play the Hero™ like lmfao of course, bc that’s what someone with a lot of pride who wants the glory of being a savoir would do, be ready to lay down their life for everyone around them (and I do mean everyone, even fucking total strangers) at any given moment. Where they wouldn’t be able to enjoy any of the glory. Bc they’d be fucking dead. Ok. He’s not death seeking or being reckless with his own wellbeing for any other reason whatsoever, I’m sure.

this man fucking FROLICS. He is so full of goddamn WHIMSY. You know his ass loves to stargaze on clear autumn nights, memorizing the constellations and everything about astrological mythology. The next day, he goes to chase little critters in the woods because he wants to know how they eat food when they don't have mouths.

The hate that Stanford gets low-key feels like people who hated Mabel growing up to hate Ford ngl.

It's so funny to me when people criticize Light Yagami for using heart attacks as his modus operandi and not randomizing the deaths 'cause it just shows that they have no idea what Light aims to achieve in doing that

In the original novella, we only "see" three characters die. One is Hastie Lanyon, whose death isn't gruesome and startling like Carew's, but that meets an arguably violent end.

While Carew draws the ire of Hyde through simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time, being cordial to the wrong person, being, Lanyon rather doesn't. Instead, it is his act of loyalty towards Jekyll, the man he hasn't talked to in a decade and calls him a pedant when he isn't listening, what kills him. Once again good deeds are punished with death. The difference, though, doesn't just reside in the fact that Hyde never once needs to put a finger on Lanyon to kill him, but the fact that it is a deeply personal loss- on both sides.

Jekyll-as-Hyde correctly assesses that Lanyon will help a friend in need. He himself says that Lanyon would gladly sacrifice his right arm to save him in body and mind, and with those words he convinces him to come to the rescue via bringing Hyde the serum's ingredients from the cabinet, now forbidden to him. And Lanyon is a good man. He's sensible enough to bring a gun with himself, he's kind enough to help Jekyll even though he believes he's finally lost it -and he's not entirely wrong-, and he's open-minded enough to not only chalk up his supernatural hatred of Hyde to a silly personal bias rather than dismiss him as "deformed", but to also fight against it and be nice to him.

No, Lanyon doesn't meet his violent end through physical violence. All he does is fall into Hyde's trap and give in to curiosity. And that's how, in his narration, Chapter 9, we learn what really killed him in Chapter 6, weeks after the events transpired. His mysterious "disease", the thing eating up at him, is the revelation. One of his closest friends -despite it all- has placed his trust upon him, and his reward is to see him at his pettiest, his cruelest, his worst. To learn that his friend was a monster, all along. No. That he turned into one, on his own volition. The choice was his. And now that he's realized it was a dark path to walk, he can't un-walk it. He can't stop, even if he wanted to, cursing himself with a monstrousness that fights back at any attempt at a fix and yet needs to be fixed to save its skin.

There is no "normal" to recover. Jekyll had always carried with him the elements of his destruction- his arrogance and his bile. The revelation that Hyde never really existed destroys Lanyon's static and material worldview, smashing the orderly world he lives in to bits. The revelation that Hyde was created for a specific purpose, and what it was, destroys Lanyon's view of Jekyll as an eccentric but harmless man, a good person with misguided opinions and fanciful theories.

Does Jekyll ever learn of Lanyon's death? Does Utterson ever bring it up behind the scenes, out of the third-person narrator's scope? Will he ever know that his last crime was killing the man that saved his life?

Well... Ironically, Lanyon didn't really save Jekyll's life. He only extended it for a couple of months, prevented Hyde from being arrested and tried and executed for God knows how many crimes of indeterminate nature. After all, if his criminal record killed him of shock, or at least poured salt into the wound, it had to be gruesome. Thanks to Lanyon's intervention Hyde can return to the house as Jekyll and attempt at resuming a normal life, without success. Soon enough he transforms again, and runs out of salts, and is found dead on the floor with the vial he just emptied of cyanide still in his cold hand.

How do we define violence in a world in which body and mind are one? In the world of Jekyll and Hyde, thoughts and ideas are physical, real, tangible. Hyde is, ultimately, a concept, the sketch of a person disguising a fractured mind disguising a sad mad genius that desires to not desire. We can consider Lanyon one of Hyde's victims, but can we call Lanyon's death violent? I would say so. Like Carew, all he ever did, at least within the constraints of the story -a snapshot of a disjointed Gothic world-, was being kind to someone who didn't deserve it.

At the beginning of this post, I said there were three on-page deaths, three deaths we got to "see" in Stevenson's novella. The third death would be Jekyll's. And it is violent, as well- first his original identity dies, unable to be present, made physical, made real, by want of not being able to manifest itself, or rather, by want of not being able to not manifest Hyde's. In a sense, he's run out of opportunities to be "good". If Jekyll can no longer be Jekyll-as-Jekyll, and only has Jekyll-as-Hyde left, Jekyll no longer exists. As he puts it, he's forced to resume Hyde's personality for the last time- to put on a costume that has turned into himself. Hyde never existed as a person, and in the last eight days of his life he has to be, because Hyde is all he's got left of a person.

It's impossible to not think of a suicide, even a suicide by poison, as violent. But Jekyll's death is violent not just because he eventually goes through with his "promise" of sorts that he'll have to die to rid the world of Hyde (and so we have Hyde killing himself if only to not end up in the gallows, fullfilling his ultimate desire, because that's what he, as a concept, was designed to do). It is also violent because by the time he physically dies, he's long gone. He's committed enough violence against himself already, destroying his belongings and thinking of himself as either his oppressive father or his idiot son, depending on what body he's been thrown into at the time.

The horror of Jekyll and Hyde is the horror of the perversion of the intimate, on all levels. Your best friend is not who he claimed to be. Your body as an extension of yourself isn't to be trusted. Helping others gets you killed. Edward Hyde pollutes everything he touches- breaks into a homicidal rage at someone being polite at him, accidentally curses his savior with the decay of the soul, self harms in the most twisted way possible and dies two times, brings the worst in all those that look at him, brings terror into your house, ruins the night, and breaks the peace.

It is only logical that something -someone?- that ruins everything to its very core comes from within, and is ultimately the cause for three very twisted, and violent, forms of death.

We as a society don’t talk about the “If I am a chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers” as often as we should

this is such an unserious take for me to post but like. stan did not teach himself all sorts of super-advanced experimental physics to rebuild the portal.

stan had the portal that was already complete and functional but broken. and repaired it enough to turn it back on. which he did by following the instructions in the journals. like. cmon man. no, stan is not an epic supergenius who without any instruction, education, or outside help built an entire interdimensional portal from scratch. like. why would he even need the journals if the "stan single handedly taught himself how to build a portal" take was true. cmon man be fr

The two types of Humanity majors:

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Either way both their science major friends died

Utterson and Enfield: "Hey buddy, want to talk for a bit?"

Jekyll: "Oh, I'd love to. But the Horrors say no."

Utterson and Enfield: "What?"

Jekyll: "Yeah, bad case of the Horrors right now. Sorry :(" -barrel rolls away from the window-