Victor Frankenstein Learning All He Needs To From College And Leaving Early Vs Dr. Jekyll Collecting

Hyde as a metaphysical anomaly. He shouldn’t exist. Hyde as an infohazard. You will never understand him or describe him. Hyde as a hole ripped into the fabric of reality, a bending of physics and biology. He carries outliers with him. Coins fall on their edge. Cats hiss. Milk curdles. Hyde as a supernatural entity in all but name, making you doubt what the true limits of science are. A fae of the modern era, a spirit of the laboratory, a spell conjured not by magic but reason. Jekyll as a willing vessel of a knowledge so troubling it’s corrosive, the poisonous influence of Hyde and the distortion he brings onto natural law seeping out of him and peeking out not with life of its own but a mockery of it. His fingers brush the Bible, and the paper withers.

the book of bill all but spells out that ford's "ego" is a front he uses to overcompensate for a fucked-up smorgasbord of self-esteem issues and insecurities and people will still post shit like "ford is so inhumanly selfish he totally didn't even care about the apocalypse plot, he was only upset about bill's betrayal because it meant he wasn't as special and perfect as he thought"

but anyway to make a larger point here the problem with the interpretation that ford is just a horrible person is that it actually causes a lot of his actions to not make any sense.

like, why is he thinking "i'm sorry fiddleford" when he hasn't seen or heard from fiddleford in three decades? why does he invite stan to play d&d&md with him? in lost legends, why did he try so hard to help stan prove his innocence? in college, why did he immediately stand up for fiddleford, who was at this time a stranger to him? why did he try to make friends in gravity falls at first? why did he try to protect those kids from the krampus? why did he rage against the northwest family after finding out what they did?

multiple different interpretations of a story can be valid but like, the franchise canon has repeatedly shown that ford will be kind and principled in situations where he stands to gain absolutely nothing from it. if he really is so deeply selfish and egocentric that he would willingly and knowingly bring about an apocalypse just so he can be "special," WHY would he do that?

every "ford is a bad person" argument absolutely falls apart under scrutiny because of the sheer amount of cherry-picking and mental gymnastics you have to do to reach that conclusion.

No one:

Describing Mr. Hyde:

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

Still thinking about the night Utterson broke down the door/read the letters. To me it was all within the same 24 hours.

I’ve seen the idea here and there that Utterson read the letters there in Jekyll’s cabinet and then could look at Hyde’s body with realization and grief. However, I think it much more likely that he didn’t read Jekyll’s statement until at least a couple hours later, when he was at home alone. This would’ve been after searching for Jekyll or signs of where his body could be, notifying the police, telling them his statement (which includes however long they kept him hanging around before and after that), and going home and possibly processing this weird and distressing night for a bit.

While I definitely feel the appeal of wanting Utterson to have his closure to Jekyll by observing Hyde’s body with the knowledge, it’s so much more sad to think that he’s not going to get that chance. If there was a funeral for Jekyll (there probably was), it was with his body absent, because it was never found (unless there wasn’t a service because he would’ve been presumed missing).

By the time he’d read both letters, Hyde’s (Jekyll’s) body would’ve been in custody, waiting for autopsy, if not already begun. So then … what’s Utterson supposed to do? Tell people that’s actually Jekyll’s body? His friend since his youth whom he held dear to his heart and who deserves a proper burial and service? … No. He can’t do that. He’d be taken for having gone mad. Unless he showed the letters as proof.

But then, if they are believed, Jekyll’s reputation would be completely ruined. You know what people are like when someone they like/respect turns out to be a horrible person. And in a society when everyone puts on the facade in public … it would also haunt Utterson more out loud rather than just in his thoughts, and that’s horrible enough without making his everyday life worse.

No. There’s no saving Jekyll’s body. He died as Hyde and he can’t be recovered. His body will be subjected to whatever treatment the bodies of criminals were subjected to. And Utterson will likely keep quiet.

If there was a funeral service for Jekyll and Utterson went, he’d be surrounded by people who would know so little of the truth about the man they would be singing the praises of. And Utterson would have to be quiet and bear through it.

The main person he would’ve talked to about all this is already dead. From learning the truth firsthand. Anyone else he talks to would compromise Jekyll’s memory. What would finding out the truth do to Poole? Could Enfield keep his mouth shut? … Dare Utterson risk finding out?

I think he’d just keep it secret, keep it safe. If he did carry on through life, he’d be doing it with a new layer to the facade he already wore daily. He’d have to carry on, hear the platitudes—“Terribly sorry for your loss.” “Fine man, that Dr. Jekyll.” “London is all the poorer now.” “Good man, good man.” “How’ve you been holding up?”—and try to roll with it. Holding all that knowledge and emotion behind the facade. Confiding in no one.

Like his friend.

Jekyll and Hyde looks like a typical character vs own dark impulses gothic tale but it’s actually a very biting psychological horror story centered around the loss of identity and mental illness as a form of death.

Lanyon gives up on life after witnessing something he believes to be impossible (and that he even doubts was real), and only physically dies after he’s been left a husk of himself. Jekyll gradually loses the grip on reality and eventually dissociates to the point he can’t even see himself in his own fabricated identity, and only physically dies after he loses most of his personality and sense of self.

For all the waxing about these two being scared of death, they experienced it while they were still alive, and what ultimately died were the closest thing to an empty shell of a body you can get in a semi-realistic setting. Both characters‘ ultimate fate is underlined by a passage in which Jekyll describes himself dissociating after telling Lanyon the truth. As much as one believes and the other doesn’t, both are left traumatized by something that, in real life, is impossible.

It has been argued that rather than good vs evil the book touches on repression vs indulgence but I think it also has a layer of reality vs unreality. By the end of Henry’s narration, we don’t quite know how much of it was true and how much of it was lies or delusions. Either way, the main conflict in the last chapter isn’t one of man vs man, but rather man vs self, man vs perception, man vs mental decay, and not in a traditional “darkness inside” way but in one that is deliberately similar to real life struggles with addiction and psychosis.

hey guys i’m here to introduce my dishevelled and crazy wives

low empathy henry jekyll. low empathy jekyll who always shows compassion and kindness because he chooses to. low empathy jekyll with a very strong moral code. low empathy jekyll seeing empathy as a performance and a duty (one that he must excel in, as in all things). low empathy jekyll who knows how society expects him to feel and on most good days can half-convince himself he genuinely does. low empathy jekyll thinking there’s something inherently wrong with him. low empathy jekyll thinking he can cut the bad parts out. low empathy jekyll becoming hyde, who is much the same, but has no morals, logic, societal expectation, or interpersonal connection to make him behave kindly. low empathy henry jekyll/edward hyde.

Being a Stanford Pines fan/defender on Tiktok is like fighting a losing battle.. Having to see those horrendous takes everyday actually takes years of my lifespan.

“Hyde is the innocence of evil. He stands for the truth (attested by a hundred tales of hypocrites and secret sins) that there is in evil, though not in good, this power of self-isolation, this hardening of the whole exterior, so that a man becomes blind to moral beauties or deaf to pathetic appeals. A man in pursuit of some immoral mania does attain an abominable simplicity of soul; he does act from one motive alone. Therefore he does become like Hyde, or like that blood-curdling figure in Grimm’s fairy-tales, ‘a little man made of iron’. But the whole of Stevenson’s point would have been lost if Jekyll had exhibited the same horrible homogeneity.

Precisely because Jekyll, with all his faults, possesses goodness, he possesses also the consciousness of sin, humility. He knows all about Hyde, as angels know about devils. And Stevenson specially points out that this contrast between the blind swiftness of evil and the almost bewildered omniscience of good is not a peculiarity of this strange case, but is true of the permanent problem of your conscience and mine. If I get drunk I shall forget dignity; but if I keep sober I may still desire drink. Virtue has the heavy burden of knowledge; sin has often something of the levity of sinlessness.”

— G.K. Chesterton: “Tricks of Memory”