And As She So Sat She Became Aware Of An Aged Beautiful Gentleman With White Hair, Drawing Near Along

Decided to do my annual Jekyll and Hyde reread and only now chose to look up the story of Damon and Pythius that Lanyon mentions. I'm in shambles.

Basically, Pythius was sentenced to death for conspiring against the tyrant king of Syracuse, and he requested to see his family one last time before his execution. Damon offered himself to take Pythius' stead as a hostage, and the king said that if Pythius did not return within a specific time, Damon would be executed instead. The king fully believed that Pythias wouldn't return and would leave Damon to die, but Pythias swam his ass to shore after he was thrown overboard by pirates to ensure he made it back to Syracuse in time. The king was so impressed by Pythias' fidelity and Damon's trust that he pardoned both of them.

Their relationship is like the Good Ending to Lanyon and Jekyll's. Even after being separated by differing scientific opinions, Lanyon continued showing an interest in Jekyll's wellbeing. He agrees to help Jekyll get the ingredients for the potion despite having no idea what it's for, only knowing his friend was in significant distress. Even with distance between them, Jekyll knows he can depend on Lanyon to help him. Pythias and Jekyll are also uncannily similar: Pythias challenged a tyrant, and Jekyll challenged God. Where Pythias/Damon and Jekyll/Lanyon differ, however, is that this implicit trust leads to Jekyll and Lanyon's downfall-- not just of their relationship, but of themselves.

I will never get over how tragic their relationship was (whether you see it as romantic or platonic). Both of them (and Utterson) loved and trusted each other so much it's sickening. I will never get over these old men who were supposed to live and die together.

maybe it’s just me but Jekyll and Hyde loses something when it doesn’t have Jekyll’s first person narration (or other equivalent narration tool) (and it has to be book accurate) because you really can’t understand what Jekyll is going through unless we really get in his head. Even if he lies. if anything the lies are even more revealing. watching it from the outside you can see what his situation looks like, but not what it is. only when you understand him, his motives, his thoughts, the horror and the tragedy reveal themselves- the layers of metaphor are peeled back and we can really see Jekyll’s fear, confusion, hurts, losses- his shame, his guilt, the sort of person he is, the sort of person he wants to be, and how all that sent him down a spiral of self-destruction so bizarre it can only be truly understood from within, and even then, we’re at the mercy of his narration, of his denial, of his torment. only he can explain what is what makes this story scary, and he will control what we know of it.

Victor Frankenstein learning all he needs to from college and leaving early vs Dr. Jekyll collecting degrees like a pokemon trainer.

Oh Yeah, I forgot I edited these.

I edited these two pictures of Robert Cuccioli from the 1995 First US Tour of Jekyll & Hyde the Musical to be in color back in January.

there are so many possibilities when it comes to other symptoms of HJ7 that isnt told to us and i cannot stop thinking about it

vomiting, distorted vision, twitching, breathing problems, increased appetite, muscle numbness, false memories, auditory hallucinations, increased heart beat, hypersensitivity, lack of sensitivity, stretch marks, damaged vocal chords, memory loss, increased blood loss, swollen muscles, tics, abnormal pain, poor circulation, dizziness, nose bleeds, peeling skin, weight loss

Do you get it now? Without due process, everyone is at risk. How are you going to prove your citizenship otherwise?

Can we get into more Real Talk about Ford's low self-esteem, please?

He’s just

…

His automatic assumption is that everyone hates him.

His default method of making friends is trying his damnedest to impress them while simultaneously revealing little to no information about himself.

Because “trust no one” is just another way of saying “no one cares about you” (remember Dipper’s monologue at the end of episode 1? About how he was going to keep trusting Mabel because she cared about him?)

Because the poor kid got relentlessly bullied any time he tried to express himself or talk about his interests. (Remember show and tell? Remember Cathy Crenshaw?)

Because he’d rather disappear off the face of the fucking earth than deal with another betrayal, because the people he picks to be his friends always betray him and why wouldn’t they?

Because (@kryptonite-tie and I were just talking about this too) it’s so fucking easy to get on Ford’s good side but once you’ve Hurt Him then it’s nearly impossible to get away from his bad side because he immediately puts up walls because he doesn’t want to get hurt again

And yeah that’s not the healthiest way to go about things, and led to a lot of misunderstandings and a lot of unhealthy arguments between good friends (Stanley and Fiddleford, most notably) and led to a lot of grudge holding (Stan and Bill, most notably) but it’s kept him in some bizarre state of ‘safe’ and he can’t stop?

All Jheselbraum had to do was save Ford’s life and this earned her Ford calling her “the opposite of Bill”

All Dipper had to do was play a board game to become Ford’s friend. And Ford seriously doubted that Dipper would be at all understanding or kind if he told him about Bill.

And Bill?

All Bill had to do was show up and fucking say he was Ford’s friend.

I’m convinced that the reason Ford didn’t spend a whole lot of time with Mabel? Was because he thought she was too cool for him. Like, he thinks she’s way out of his friend league. He witnessed her becoming pen pals with a pizza delivery guy in 60 seconds, he knows she has multiple friends and has had multiple boyfriends at an age where Ford was still getting rocks thrown at his head and pelted with footballs. To Ford, Mabel is cooler than cool and couldn’t possibly want to spend time with him, of all people. And what he doesn’t realize is that Mabel doesn’t operate that way, of course she wants to spend time with him.

He is ready for death at all times and seems incapable of comprehending the idea that people might actually care about him with no ulterior motives whatsoever.

It takes him so damn long to realize that. He’s flabbergasted when Fiddleford forgives him, he’s awestruck when Dipper relates with him and continues to view him as a role model after learning the truth, he practically worships Jheselbraum, and Stan? By the finale, Stan is Ford’s entire world.

Cause it’s easy for people to make friends with Ford. It’s hard to keep his trust, and it’s hard to earn his forgiveness if he feels you’ve legitimately wronged him.

And he assumes that everyone else works the same way.

Like, he’s really forgiving of minor mistakes. He never blames people for shit that’s not their fault, or that he doesn’t think is their fault.

But if it is/if he does think it’s their fault? Good fucking luck mate.

And cause he views himself as a freak? He’s already made his Mistake. He doesn’t get another. He’s out of chances. So he tries desperately to make up for it by being perfect, a standard he holds literally no one else to.

(I think this might have started the rift between Ford and Stan: in ford’s mind, stan gets to make mistakes that he can’t. gets to make choices that he can’t. Stan can go with the flow, Ford has to run his decisions goals and dreams through a million filters before he makes them. He has to justify every action, for everything from stealing radioactive waste to getting to know his new family members we all know the ‘testing for portal radiation’ thing was a ruse so Ford could get to know the kids and soos. otherwise he would have done stan too. right down to whether or not he can take classes he actually enjoys in college, because he might have needed another one laterthat line in the journal where Ford berated himself for treating himself to an extra applied quantum phase theory instead of hyper advanced engineering and fifth dimensional calculus doesn’t sound like academic arrogance to me. it sounds like hell. it sounds like he’s punishing himself for doing something nice for himself. Not only that, but Ford ‘treating himself’ to such a class is the closest thing to self care we’ve yet to see from Ford what Ford doesn’t realize is that while Stan might not have to rationalize everything, he’s in the same boat, but his philosophy is different. His philosophy is Why try when everyone’s just going to say you’re not good enough. this is also counteracted by love from his family but that’s for another post.)

The cheval glass scene completes the mirror imagery in Jekyll and Hyde, with the third incident highlighting the cruel irony of Jekyll’s fate. The cheval glass, displaying the hellish glow of the fire while facing heavenward, mocks Jekyll’s statement that the potion is “neither diabolical nor divine.” The mirror appears both diabolical and divine in this moment; the potion, in being merely a chemical mixture and not a magical cure, is too exactly the opposite of the diabolic or divine—it has no power whatsoever over the self. Just as the mirror distorts the laboratory room, failing to accurately reflect Poole’s and Utterson’s images, so has the potion warped Jekyll’s reality, driving him to suicide. What Jekyll has mistaken to be a problem of industrial commodity standardization—an inconsistent batch of chemical salts—actually demonstrates, through his inability to divorce his addictive desires from his otherwise respectable identity, the self’s fundamentally unitary nature. Stevenson positions this basic human truth as the ironic tragedy of Jekyll and Hyde, using addiction to establish that despite discordant desires, on a fundamental level the self is inescapably unitary.

-Jessica Cook, The Unitary Self in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The thing with Hyde's personhood is that from the moment it's revealed he's not "real", he as a character becomes more blurry. Is Hyde a person because at his core he's still Jekyll despite wearing a disguise, or is Hyde a person because he's trascended his original purpose of being Jekyll's disguise and has, ultimately, become Jekyll by virtue of occupying all his physical and mental space?

Thinking about the birth imagery and pregnancy horror themes in Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde. How they’re going on opposite directions.

Frankenstein desiring to “birth” through unnatural ways out of spite, out of a need to prove a point. Jekyll being forced to continuously “birth” and simultaneously ”be birthed” as the aftermath of a choice which was to indeed birth the separation of good and evil.

Frankenstein creating an unnatural person, designed and expected to be perfect, through an unnatural conception with no pregnancy. Jekyll becoming an unnatural person that was never conceived, unwittingly made perfectly monstrous, through a process that is described as painful, something being ejected from his subconscious like a womb.

Frankenstein makes the perfect male body which is described as “wrong-looking”, Jekyll gives himself a “wrong”-looking male body which comes with a “wrong” mind to pair.

Creation = pregnancy and birth. Mad scientists are often characterized as fathers, being mostly men- but they’re still being the mother or taking such a role since the creation on itself is their doing- as life, or a distortion of it, or a perversión of its laws, an impossible thing is what they make.

And what more perverted an impossible -in the eyes of cishet society- than a male pregnancy?

One man wants pregnancy, dreams of it- wishes to attain it even though he knows it is impossible and suffers the consequence when a “pregnancy” with no woman ends badly, because he just wishes so; the other fears becoming pregnant, comparing the distress he suffers as he transforms as the “horror of childbirth”, as if he knew, as if he knew what it is like or felt it could be possible after all. Bodies. “Perfect” bodies, “wrong” bodies, pregnancies that end badly, men being metaphorically pregnant. I don’t know what it all could mean, frankly.

I don’t know.