[a-maniac-and-a-queen]

tbh i miss everyone in this fandom, and hope you're all doing well <3

[usergrantaire]

ENJOLRAS + tags (insp.)

[p-trichor]

headcanon that Enjolras is a terrible liar

[pumpkinspice-prouvaire]

he’s be able to lie to people he doesn’t know like government officials, journalists, the police, etc. no problem

but his friends? no chance

Combeferre asks “hey did you pick up my dry cleaning like I asked you to?” and he just says “uhhhhhhhh………” for like 30 seconds and then runs away 

[p-trichor]

enjolras to javert: I have literally never seen a cockade rosette mister

enjolras to courfeyrac: your leftover pasta…..was eaten….by grantaires cat

[aromantic-enjolras]

It all comes down to guilt. Lying to the cops? A political necessity and all they deserve. Lying to his friends? Heart-wrenching. How can he betray their trust like that. He can’t. He feels too bad about it.

[alouettesque]

🔥 grantaire from lm

grantaire is a genuinely interesting character in canon, and his relationship with enjolras is also genuinely interesting in canon. tragically, almost all grantaire fans seem to think that, in order to find a character interesting, they must also make that character palatable, and in order to find a relationship interesting, they must make it reciprocated.

also, interpreting grantaire as wanting to actually Be in a relationship with enjolras is extremely boring

[secretmellowblog]

I have a complicated emotional relationship with Javert where like– I WILL write a million posts about the tragedy of his story, but any time someone says “Javert wasn’t that bad!” I’m like “nahhhhh he was That Bad. He was definitely That Bad. He was 100 percent absolutely the living embodiment of That Bad. If you look up ‘That Bad’ in the dictionary, you get a picture of Javert.”

One character Javert reminds me of a lot is Azula, from Avatar the Last Airbender!

Azula and Javert  enthusiastically defend an evil society with a CARTOONISH level of drama and cruelty. They both represent extremely Loaded concepts– Azula and the Fire Nation symbolize imperialism/colonialism; Javert is a symbol how there is no way to be a “good” police officer because the system the police enforce is inherently cruel.

But both of them are tragic and sympathetic in a lot of ways? Azula is Zuko’s foil and a child soldier; Javert is Valjean’s foil and I’ve been Sad about him a lot, most recently here and here and here.

Despite how tragic they are, neither of them gets a redemption arc.  Instead, they both have mental breaks and self-destruct.

So because they’re written as tragic characters who begin to realize they’re Wrong but never truly get “redeemed,”, there’s tons of fanfiction/meta exploring how they could redeem themselves! Which I love!

But any time I see someone like Andrew Davies in the BBC miniseries act like “Javert wasn’t that bad, he was just enforcing the law!” …….It feels like saying “Azula wasn’t that bad, she was just trying to spread the glory of the Fire Nation!” The whole point was that the systems they were enforcing were bad, and they were bad for enforcing them.

And just like Azula, I feel turning Javert into a “softhearted woobie who was secretly nice the whole time” makes him a lot less compelling….like he may not be The Villain™ of Les Mis, but he was at least on the villain’s side until he let Valjean go.

Idk if this is coherent but like. I do really sympathize with these characters, and would’ve loved to see them redeemed. But I feel like a redemption arc isn’t about “learning you were secretly never wrong and were Good the whole time” but “accepting you were Awful and Wrong, and striving to be better”

[secondary-i-moved-out-from]

are we gonna talk about how eponine, the daughter of two criminals, poor and filthy, lives on the streets, is the one that's most frequently played by a black woman?

“it's just easier to picture her as a black than cosette” of course it is and i think we all know why.

[peremadeleine]

The whole shop seemed a palace to her: the doll was not a doll; it was a vision. It was joy, splendor, riches, happiness, which appeared in a sort of chimerical halo to that unhappy little being so profoundly engulfed in gloomy and chilly misery. With sad and innocent sagacity of childhood, Cosette measured the abyss that separated her from that doll. She said to herself that one must be a queen, or at least a princess, to have a “thing” like that. She gazed at that beautiful pink dress, that beautiful smooth hair, and she thought, “How happy that doll must be!”

[dhufflebee]

#it’s a shame this costume is barely visible when she wears it in the movie  #bc I love the idea of adult Cosette dressing like her beloved doll  #symbolic of how far she’s come: she’s crossed that ‘abyss’ and has realized the ‘vision’  #beautiful dress; smooth hair; loving father - how happy that doll must be!  #cries about it   (via)

[badlesmisimagines]

ummmmmmm sweaty don't call yourself a Les Mis nerd unless you PERSONALLY robbed corpses at Waterloo :)) so many fake fans out here who dont even know abt theodule's gecko collection 😭😭 REAL les mis fans gave hugo a cheeky handjob under his desk

[boxfivetrades]

On John Napier’s set design for Les Miserables:

The organisation and placement of the scenes on the continuously revolving stage floor is beyond praise. And John Napier’s design certainly does much to honour Hugo’s Paris as he lavished on Dickens’s London. Two huge trucks rumble on and form a barricaded wall which, just as Hugo describes, seems to contain a city in itself, a fantastic jumble of chairs, barrels, planks and people, a teeming segment of a revolutionary catacomb.

- Michael Coveney, The Financial Times (9 October 1985)

[hawberries]

I obnoxiously racebended les amis so I could think about a Tianenmen Square 1989 AU and cry for a decade

(i have not read the Brick yet so all my knowledge of most of these characters come from fanfic and fan synopses, please forgive! feuilly and bahorel in particular do not have very notable presences in the fanfic i’ve read, so i just tried my best. also i know it’s really weird to label chinese kids w/ french surnames but i’m really bad at chinese names OTL but i couldn’t leave them unlabled because…im really bad at character design…I’M GOMEN)

[flowerytale]

Victor Hugo — Les Misérables

[somuchbetterthanthat]

Yesterday I couldn’t fall asleep and my brain jumped to “moments les amis had their ‘oh shit i’m a bit in love with him’ realization around Enjolras, whether it lasted a minute, a week, a year, or a life time”

Bahorel: obviously the first time he and Enjolras got into a rousing argument with royalists, which ended in a fight. Enjolras not only stood his ground, he managed to get most of them out without hurting them too bad, and then raised his head, straightened up, and apart from a loose cravat, a slightly ruffled coat and hair, and pinker cheeks than usual, he looked exactly as untouched and divine as always.

Courfeyrac: Enjolras got him out of a frankly ridiculous affair then proceed to help him on a perhaps as equally ridiculous endeavour to Save his Honour, or something like that. When Courfeyrac, who would have never thought his serious political ally would do this, asked him why, Enjolras leant his head slightly on the side, pensive, raised his eyebrows and said, with such perfect honesty: “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Combeferre: the first time Enjolras did something genuinely kind and selfless for a poor woman in need or like, one of the Paris gamins. When pressed about it, Enjolras told him that just because he believed there was more good to achieve with big changes, didn’t mean he would not do his upmost to encourage little changes and good deads when the occasion arise. 

Prouvaire: a morning in a parc, after it had snowed heavily in Paris for the first time of the year. Enjolras had agreed to a walk with him. He stood a bit confused near a tree when Prouvaire felt the need to stop and stare at nature, and then a beam of sunlight hit Enjolras’ hair; there was snow on his shoulders, and he looks absolutely etheral and beautiful and soft. 

Feuilly: Every single time Enjolras stilled when offered an opinion contradicting his own, every time Enjolras thought this through, every time Enjolras recognized, softly, that he had made a mistake, that he had been too hasty, too harsh, or thinking too small, and learnt from it with such seriousness and eagerness. 

Bossuet: @deboracabral already made the perfect comic for it of course; Bossuet fell in love the first time Enjolras genuinely laughed at one of his puns. 

Joly: EASIER. It was the first time Enjolras actually made a pun. (also, the first time Enjolras brought a basket full of medecine to Joly upon learning he was truly sick, and said he had both remembered Joly’s recommandations, and asked Combeferre for advice to provide Joly with the best care possible) 

Grantaire: the first time Enjolras spoke, and every single time he opened his mouth afterwards. 

Bonus: 

Marius: “Citoyen, ma mère, c’est la République”. The manga got it right as a moment of absolute crush, but of course Marius didn’t realize in the midst of a blow to his new found political opinions, and therefore it cannot exactly be counted as a ‘oh shit’ moment. 

[enjol-rad]

HEY GUYS YOU KNOW WHEN R KINDA TRIPS IN THIS SCENE

HE’S NOT JUST STUPID DRUNK HE’S TRIPPING OVER JOLY, COURFEYRAC, AND COMBEFERRE’S BODIES

I HATE THIS MOVIE SO MUCH

[voidify-artblog]

so i’ve been reading the brick and that is all the context you need for this post

[calamitys-child]

Just rediscovered potentially the funniest thing I’ve written in recent memory

[calamitys-child]

Imagine if people wrote all their Les Mis modern aus in the style of Victor Hugo

[calamitys-child]

An excerpt

[secretmellowblog]

Thank you!

Les Meowserables

[musings-of-a-monster]

You know that Valjean, Javert, and Cosette must all eat incredibly fast.

Valjean must have had to scarf down every meal he had in prison. And then in M-sur-M, he probably didn’t fall out of the habit before he became mayor. As mayor, he would have had to squeeze meals in between duties and alms giving and making children toys out of plants. I can’t see him dropping that habit as convent gardener, either. When he left, what motivation would he have had to stop?

Javert probably hadn’t taken a lunch break in his entire life. Growing up in a jail, he would have eaten whatever he got as fast as he could before someone took it away from him. As a guard in Toulon, it was probably much the same. As an officer, I can only imagine he ate exactly as often as a superior reminded him to while on the clock.

Cosette spent her early years as a glorified slave for the Thenadiers. She probably ate What She Was Given and Was Grateful. She would have had to wolf it down before the Thenadiers changed their minds. The convent probably tried to teach her to eat like a normal person, but kids want to finish lunch and go play, right? Probably the closest Cosette got to breaking the habit was having Toussaint over Cosette’s should telling her to slow down. But old habits are hard to break.

So imagine Marius at the dinner table with his upper class upbringing gripped by a terrible awe watching all this. Two men and his wife setting upon supper like feral hounds. He wants to get the butter, but he’s afraid that if he puts his hand in there, there’s a non-zero chance he won’t get it back.