Cain Saying “am I My Brother’s Keeper” Right After He Killed Him Is So Funny. It’s GOD. He SAW

rolls up a year and a half late with starbucks and part one of the kaysanova getting-together fic series, in which nicky develops a conscience and absolutely no one gets together except to kill each other some more

New chapter up for Climbing to the Light!

I was about to make an impassioned argument complete with bullet points for why Javert didn’t actually kill Fantine, except I already wrote a chapter in my WIP addressing that issue.

so here, have Fantine’s ghost giving Javert the lowdown.

send a number and a prompt you know the drill

|| for talagaindescendants, Edain palette #4.

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I

thank you

Friend Like Me

Grantaire was a puzzle.

He painted, he sketched, he made jokes that had them laughing until their sides hurt, he rambled about gods and men, he knew all the good cafés and restaurants, he could fence, he could box. He knew Paris almost as well as Bahorel did.

And yet, for all his talents, he kept himself to a bottle of absinthe or wine.

Joly and Bossuet would go drinking with Grantaire, often enough that it was not a surprise on the fifth of June that Grantaire joined them for breakfast. But Joly couldn't help noticing that a man of such talents, such potential, drowned himself in alcohol.

When Enjolras said that Grantaire was incapable of loving, of feeling, of believing, Joly saw, and saw the way the words stuttered forth like frightened children.

"Y-y-you'll see."

Like a genie trapped in a lamp.

Rilwen I wrote more of the thing and I decided to dump it here because it’s too big to dump on Skype

and probably knowing me it’ll end up being a series of minifics that I dump here based on the same reincarnation au

oH WELL ??

under a cut, because it’s gotten damn long (cries)

Sobekhotep and Nastasen.

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Read More

final for my 2D foundation class. i wanted to approach the issue of society vilifying women for their sexual decisions. things may or may not change before i print them on sunday, idk. 

finally pruned this blog down to less than 100 posts. I feel so clean and shiny and new.

it’s not fantine week anymore but that doesn’t mean i’m not eternally thinking about fantine so *fingerguns* here we go.

“i only understand love and liberty” is something that grantaire says but it might as well be fantine’s motto too because let’s be real here, these people come at it from different directions but they come to the same conclusion.

big old ramble under the cut.

grantaire is a student, or a former student by the time 1832 rolls around; he’s bossuet’s age, which i think comes to 4 years older than enjolras, which puts him at a solid age 30 at the barricade, 26 when marius meets the ensemble at the musain. in his debut, which is to say his introduction in a scene versus a description by hugo, he gives a grand declamation which takes up over five pages. i tried reading the whole thing in french and my eyes glazed over; in english it’s little better, if more decipherable since it’s my native language. friends, grantaire is verbose. but we can gather a few things from his long-ass rant:

that he apprenticed under gros, a painter of the time, and stole the apples he was supposed to have been drawing from still life (presumably ate them too). what we can take from this is that he is from a wealthy enough family to devote his time to learning how to paint, rather than a trade, e.g. feuilly.

that he believes virtue can easily turn into vice, saying almost the same thing in dialogue as a throwaway line that hugo said in description about javert when he got his terrible st michael on while arresting valjean in m-sur-m. (he also, in a single throwaway line -- the hapgood translation is “a bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous than the asp and the cobra” -- sums up fantine’s entire awful fate.)

that he is probably not an atheist, but definitely isn’t on board with the idea of an all-knowing all-powerful all-merciful god.

that a big part of why he believes this is because he sees how the world suffers. he has studied history and sees the way it repeats itself; he gives several classical examples and compares them to the contemporary history of his day. he also gives a statistic (how accurate it is i couldn’t tell you) about the number of deaths from hunger in a single neighborhood of london. he uses this as a reason to condemn all of england.

in short: grantaire is a skeptic, yes, but as the saying goes: a skeptic is only a bitterly disappointed optimist.

grantaire does not believe in the revolution because he does not think humankind has the ability to rise from its present miserable condition, and he does not think it has the will to rise from that condition either.

(at this point in time, he’s wrong about the first part, but tragically right about the second. and it’s the second one that’s the kicker.)

fantine was a gamine and a grisette. she was as musichetta is; the difference is that joly probably would actually marry musichetta, and we all know how tholomyès worked out for fantine. (poorly.) fantine was a gutter kid, who worked for her living. given an alt canon where she survives 1823 and makes it to paris with valjean and cosette (age 36 at the barricade), we can assume the following:

that while she has a comfortable place in the fauchelevent household, she will probably still be doing much of the sewing and upkeep; louison would likely take a much smaller role. she can teach cosette about coquetry and fashion, she can show cosette a little about upper society, but she cannot be part of that society any longer. she is masquerading as the shy retiring wife to a shy retiring man. theater, the arts, et cetera, these are all faded memories carefully preserved in her mind. any indulgences the fauchelevents take are pretty much relegated to walks in the luxembourg gardens.

that she has been through hell and back, and knows intrinsically both the good and the evil that every man is capable of. jean valjean in particular encapsulates this: when she knew him as mayor madeleine, he was both an angel and the very devil. so the inherent goodness of man is a complicated thing for her. perhaps some people are simply born wicked, but certainly some have wickedness thrust upon them. (yes, i know that’s from wicked, yes, i know the original shakespeare quote is a dick joke, yes, i got it, yes, grantaire would laugh his ass off at this, yes. however. still kinda true.)

that even after going through the worst hell a human can imagine, she still believes not only that there is a god but that he is good. we know this in particular because there is a bit of dialogue when she is in the hospital where she is planning what sort of confirmation dress little cosette is going to wear.

that seeing students on the street talking of barricades and rebellion would make her hackles rise like those of a cornered wolf. fantine was born in 1796, just two years after the reign of terror ended. she grew up watching napoleon’s rise to power, she grew up watching the wars, she was a young woman for the bourbon restoration. she knows what revolutions do: she is a product of one. we can reasonably extrapolate from hugo’s introduction of her character that the revolution is why she has no family and why she grew up as a gutter kid, but again: she grew up watching everything.

so fantine knows, has known from birth, how unfair the world is.

does she want the world to be better? well, sure. but while she knows that individuals can change for the better, she also knows from experience that The People generally don’t.

grantaire and fantine having a conversation about belief and revolution would be an interesting one, i think.

... and now i want to write a fic about it. damn it.