I Had A Dream Where You Were In Jail And Every Time Someone Mentioned You Your Pfp Would Appear And It

Idk I find it kind of endearing that fans of the book tend to call him The Creature rather than The Monster

victor, on being seen as mad:

What up, I'm Robert, I'm 28, I'm gay, and I never fuckin' learned how to read.

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

*jesse pinkman voice* not my house man not my house

*pats victor like you would the roof of a car* cultural osmosis really did a number on you didnt it

Gonna start using this victor drawing as the wolf sitting on tree meme because I swear to god I think about it all the time and I'm starting to say "victor posing" just how you say "shinji posing" as a reference to it

victor's belief that he's responsible for the deaths of his family (by extension of creating the creature) was borne out of excessive guilt, i might go as far as to say bordering on delusions of persecution. id argue walton was more directly responsible for deaths than victor ever was (several members of his crew died on his ship as a result of his inexperience and persistence), but first and foremost the creature was responsible, not victor, and to suggest otherwise i think is blatantly ignoring the creature's autonomy. he had a cultivated understanding of morality and the world's evils and chose, while knowing and feeling that it was a moral wrong, to murder. i think, eventually, it is this willingness to deliberately go against his own morals to commit evil acts that victor considers monstrous, not just the creature's monstrous appearance in of itself, which is one of the defining factors of his choice not to create the female creature.

if anything, id argue this passage is actually proof of victor acknowledging his "failure as a parent" or rather his duty as a parent, its just not done so directly. this is a story being told in retrospect, and that fact colors victor's narration because he already knows the events that are being described. in this sense, the quote seems more of an acknowledgement of this than anything else, particularly with the language of "creature" and "being to which they had given life" used to describe a child, which, like youre saying, are both blatant parallels to how victor describes the creature. if you look at this and then consider it within the context of victor and creature's confrontation on the alps, where victor does actually explicitly admit to his duties as a creator, i think it changes things:

For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness. These motives urged me to comply with his demand.

and then, later:

I was moved [...] I felt that there was some justice in his argument. His tale, and the feelings he now expressed, proved him to be a creature of fine sensations; and did I not as his maker, owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in my power to bestow?

in both quotes victor mentions he feels he owes the creature happiness, i.e. the same "train of enjoyment" he experienced in his own childhood, and it is the feelings the creature expressed (stemming from his mistreatment by victor, but also more importantly by society as a whole; i think people tend to overinflate the importance of the creature's "abandonment" by victor in the grand scheme of things) that push victor to this idea. that is, victor pretty directly admits to the effect of his absence on creature.

Victor Frankenstein admits multiple times that him creating the creature led to multiple deaths so he’s responsible in that sense but he assumes it’s because he created a monster but in my opinion, he knows him failing as a parent/abandoning the creature is why it turned out the way that it did, he just won’t admit it, and this passage from chapter one is my prime evidence.

I was their plaything and their idol, and something better—their child, the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties towards me. With this deep consciousness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given life, added to the active spirit of tenderness that animated both, it may be imagined that while during every hour of my infant life I received a lesson of patience, of charity, and of self-control, I was so guided by a silken cord that all seemed but one train of enjoyment to me.

anyway like. walton in the beginning says he dislikes the typical masculine crassness and brutality associated with sailors, because he was raised under the "feminine fosterage" of margaret, and then goes on for pages about how he wants a "friend whose eyes reply to his" or whatever, and that he found something close to this in his lieutenant specifically because his lieutenant has traditionally feminine virtues (dont remember exactly but it was gentleness, kind-heartedness, etc) and then this friend that hes been waiting for all along turns out to be victor. all this to say victor and walton are t4t

magnum opus pt. 2, frankenstein edition