Canon Enjolras is aromantic. Fight me.

Official French Concept Album mutual™/ Obsessive Frenchpicker/ "Pour une seule barricade qui tombe cent autres se lèveront demain" /"... and make it platonic" writer/ Aroace / Can answer asks in English, French, Spanish or Greek / Profile picture by @sybright / main: is-it-mungojerry-or-rumpelteazer

don’t ever feel bad for asking me to tag a trigger

i do not care what the trigger is

i will tag it for you

you have legitimate reasons to be triggered by it

and i am not one to question those reasons

so just send me an ask

anonymous if you’re scared

and i will tag it all the time in future

your wellbeing is worth twenty extra seconds of my time at least

[fbi-captain-rainy]

don’t ever feel bad if i dont remember to tag it

i might be on mobile

i might be dumb

i might have forgotten

just send me an ask

anon if you’re scared

i’ll correct it

your wellbeing is worth twenty extra seconds of my time at least

[arisalty]

I say this as a person with a decently smallish trigger that comes up often, but has been getting tagged more, and believe me,

I will tag it (as much as I can remember) because

👏No👏Trigger👏is👏too👏small👏or👏uncommon👏to👏tag👏

[is-it-mungojerry-or-rumpelteazer]

As someone who doesn’t know exactly what qualifies as a trigger but has had to close tabs and lay down to stop the world from spinning, just because of something they had read… Yeah. I WILL TAG ANYTHING YOU NEED ME TO.

[is-it-mungojerry-or-rumpelteazer]

Tags I use on content that can be potentially triggering:

abuse

mentions of abusive parenting

discussion of abusive relationships

mentions of death

grief

mention of injuries

mention of police brutality

covid

personal

Academia: if you don’t have a mental illness on arriving we’ll provide you with one free of charge

impostor syndrome

religion

violent imagery

ace problems

fandom drama

explicit mentions of sex

suggestive imagery

dealing with trauma

mentions of incest

mentions of genocide

mental health issues

mentions of rape

mentions of suicide

mentions of bullying

mentions of drug use

I try to be as constant as possible with those (so that you can filter them once and be done with it) and I’ll keep this list updated, but if you think a post merits them and I haven’t tagged it, please DM me/send me an ask! And if you want something tagged on top of them, don’t hesitate to ask!!!

[aromantic-enjolras]

Muslim and Maghrebi Amis headcanons

So I said the other day that this fandom needed more Muslim Amis, if we’re writing Modern AU set in France. I don’t have much time right now, but let me try to put my money where my mouth is for a bit.

For context, my usual headcanons of the Amis are that Jehan is Jewish Algerian (his family moved to France after the independence), Feuilly is Egyptian and arrived to France as a unaccompanied minor, and Bossuet is Senegalese and got to France as an adult. Marius’ dad is Moroccan, but of course he didn’t know until he was an adult. For the time of this post, Grantaire’s mom is Greek.

Feuilly works at a kebab place. It is hell during Ramadan, because it means he has to work the entire day in a hot place, surrounded by food, without drinking or eating. His boss is Muslim too, so at least the minute sundown hits they close and go home to eat.

Another, less dramatic bad consequence of his place of work, is that he spends his days cringing at French people pronouncing the items on the menu horribly wrong. He sometimes slips and uses that pronunciation when speaking to other Maghrebis and he wants to die. Those words just have no meaning to him at this point. They’re just sounds customers make.

Jehan and Feuilly bond around speaking similar Maghrebi dialects. Also, the struggle to find restaurants that serve Halal and Kosher food. Jehan complains that it isn’t fair that Feuilly can eat kosher but he can’t eat halal.

Feuilly and Enjolras (and Marius, later) are always the designated drivers/herders of drunk people because they are the only Amis who never drink.

When Marius discovers his dad was Moroccan, he converts to Islam (his far-right grandfather is horrified). He’s very serious about it, he’s super diligent with his prayers. Bossuet teases him a lot about it, he calls him “imam” and “haaji” and he asks him when he’s going to do the peregrination to Makkah.

Marius immediately starts learning Arabic to read the Quran. Enjolras decides to join him, because it’s important to be inclusive, and is very frustrated to discover that Quranic Arabic does not help him communicate.

Bossuet can read and write Arabic because he learned in Quranic school as a kid, but he doesn’t speak a word of it (and if you take the vowels out he’s lost as hell).

Bossuet is not a practicing Muslim. He eats pork, he drinks excessively, the whole shebang. He’s quite unapologetic about it. That said, he does have a different set of “clean” social media for the people at home. One time Grantaire posted a picture of them having a beer at the Musain during Ramadan to the wrong account by accident and Bossuet almost had a heart attack.

The rest of the Amis end up picking random sentences. Courfeyrac one time said “ya Allah” in front of his parents and his dad flipped his shit over “bad influences”.

Grantaire is super into Ancient Greece, and whenever there’s a debate in the Amis about whether something is Greek or Maghrebi or Middle Eastern he ends up saying some variation on “you’re all Greeks, anyway”. If Feuilly tries to say he isn’t, he simply goes “you’re from Alexandria, shut up”.

And believe me, there are a lot of debates over whether stuff is Greek or not, especially food. It usually ends with Grantaire and whoever the other person was making the dish and bringing it to the Amis to let them decide which version is better. The others aren’t complaining!

Hope you enjoyed this!

[aromantic-enjolras]

Modern AU Les Mis and French demographics

I don't know if this is a hot take or a cold one or even that relevant anymore, because I've been pretty far from the Les Mis fandom for a while, but I was talking to some French friends today and I remembered how there was talk here for a while about how Modern AU Amis needed to be more diverse. And thinking about most of the fanart/fanfic I've seen with Amis that aren't all white and French, there is just one recommendation I need to give.

You need more Muslims. And you need more Maghrebis.

I know a lot of you are working with US demographics, but those are just not true for France. Keep (South)East Asian Joly if he makes you happy, make Combeferre black if it feels right (France definitely also has a good amount of Subsaharan African immigration, and Vietnam was literally a French colony), but you need to put some Maghrebis and some Muslims in there. Otherwise it just feels wrong.

(Data under the cut)

I don't have exact data here because no official French census asks for race (that kind of question is pretty much taboo over there), but a quick search on the National Statistics Institute website shows that only 29% of the population between 18 and 59 years old declares to be Catholic, and over 10% (that is, one in every ten people) declares to be Muslim. So if you want to make your group a perfect reflection of French demographics (which it will never be), you should have one Muslim for every three Catholics (and for every five atheists).

And in terms of origin, in 2023 almost half (47.7%) of all first generation immigrants were born in Africa, and a whooping 29,2% (almost one in three!) came specifically from North Africa, the vast majority from Morocco and Algeria. Hell, around 6% come from the Middle East, that is more than the 5% you get from adding East Asia and Southeast Asia together! And Spanish-speaking American countries don't even reach 2%.

All of that to say, if you want to make your French Modern AU Amis diverse in a way that would feel real to someone who has been in France... start looking at photos of Algerian people and reading about Muslims.

[doriangraysrockcollection]

i must say, i am a huge fan of when a book is in the middle of a very exciting plot containing many interesting problems when out of nowhere for a few pages it's like, "hey by the way, real quick, here's a detailed explanation of the city's water filtration system! i'm telling you this for a reason and you should worry about it. anyway! haha okay back to the plot" and you just get to be Scared for a while

[doriangraysrockcollection]

i am kissing you on the mouth right now

you are the only person who understands me. you and the person who tagged a series of unfortunate events

[aromantic-enjolras]

And then there's Victor Hugo, who just does that for fun.

[thiswaitingheart]

Les Amis de l’Abc, Simon & Garfunkel edition (x)

Enjolras - He Was My Brother  / Combeferre - Sound of Silence / Courfeyrac - Bridge over Troubled Water / Feuilly - The Boxer / Jehan Prouvaire - Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall / Joly - Sparrow / Bossuet - Cloudy / Bahorel - Patterns / Grantaire - A Hazy Shade of Winter / Marius - For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her / Gavroche - 7 O’clock News/Silent Night 

[aromantic-enjolras]

As a S&G superfan, I don't know whether to be super fucking impressed at how well you did or annoyed that I didn't do it first!

[hard-times-paramore]

Okay, real talk now. People love to tag male characters in posts about women, but this post is gonna take this seriously. Is there actually a canonically male character you believe is a trans woman? Or at least has made into a trans woman for a fanart or a fanfic? Excluding the ones canonically implied.

Sound off in the tags! Link to the fanart or fic if available. Do it. Give me the girls. Make more women.

[aromantic-enjolras]

Does it count if my reasoning is just "my characterisation of Modern AU Grantaire is very heavily inspired by my ex before she transitioned"?

(E did save her.)

[aromantic-enjolras]

In an (extremely late) Barricade Day post, I wanted to share a quote from one of my favourite books about ACT UP.

What kind of person takes on this responsibility? What kind of person actually rises to the occasion of a mass calamity? [...] In trying to understand what they all had in common that brought them together, I started out expecting some kind of shared foundational preparation. In the beginning of the interview process, Jim and I thought that perhaps they might have all grown up with some value of community. [...] But this line of questioning led nowhere. Many reported no early orientation towards collective responsibility, while others came from generations of activists. There was no thread. Once Jim and I discarded that idea, we thought that perhaps they had all had fundamentally transformative relationships to AIDS or the gay community, but over the years even this did not pan out. [...] Some of ACT UP's most effective members had little or no relationship to AIDS when they first joined the organisation. What did these people have in common with Peter Staley, a bond trader who came to ACT UP when he himself became infected? Or with Jim Eigo, a HIV-negative gay man who had been a playwright and theatre critic? At this point I focused on people whose demographic was unusual in the ACT UP collective, hoping that the exceptions would reveal the commonality. Karen Ramspacher was one of a handful of straight people who were entirely integrated into the heart of ACT UP's work. But when I asked her and other straight people why they had joined when most heterosexuals in America were shunning and blaming people with AIDS, they didn't understand the question. In almost every case I had to make overt my goal [...] Repeatedly, responders would tell me that they didn't understand why the others weren't there! It seemed so obvious for each of them that they found other straight people's indifference to be perplexing. It was almost eight years into the process that I suddenly realized what the common denominator was. [...] Hearing this remarkable story, I suddenly realized that what all these ACT UPers had in common was not experiential. That there was no common concrete factor to their lived lives. Rather, it as characterological. These were people who were unable to sit out a historic cataclysm. They were driven, by nature, by practice, or by some combination thereof, to defend people in trouble through standing with them. What ACT UPers had in common was that, regardless of demographics, they were a very specific type of person, necessary to historical paradigm shifts. In case of emergency, they were not bystanders.

"Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993", Sarah Schulman.

[aromantic-enjolras]

The Amies of the HRT headcanons

This is based on a brainrot with @shamedumpster a long time ago, and a continuation of this post. I won't go into Grantaire, Joly and Bossuet because they are all that post.

Enjolras is really in-your-face about being trans. She is not trying to pass, she doesn't have to pass to be trans. If cis women can be butch and still be women, she can go around with a five-o-clock shadow and not go on HRT and still be a woman. One time during one of their fights Grantaire accuses her of saying that "because you already look like a girl to begin with" and she almost decked her.

Combeferre is your classic case of the person who went into a STEM major as a boy and came out as a girl. She jokes that she should have been tipped by the fact that she always played girls on RPGs. She's thankful that her coworkers are not overtly transphobes, but also sometimes they're..... they've got the spirit. That's what she tells herself. The Amies are her safe space. Also, the moment she realised she was trans she started digging into the literature. Any question you can have, she will whip out an answer, with peer-reviewed citations and footnotes.

Courfeyrac is a theatre kid. She started playing with gender at theatre, putting on dresses and makeup at rehearsals. She went down the he/they->they/them->she/they-> she/her pipeline. Her family is relatively supportive and also loaded, and she started her transition relatively young, which means she has the most complete passing out of all the Amies. She's very hot and she knows it; but she is also very careful around cis guys. She has been called "a trap" enough times to be wary.

Feuilly is mostly closeted. She can't, or doesn't dare, to be out in her blue-collar job. She can't lose her source of income, no matter how uncomfortable she is. One year she gets the courage to go to Pride, staying in the middle of the Amis and trying to stay invisible from the outside, when she hears a voice calling her deadname, and sees a girl from work looking at her. Before she can react, though, the girl is apologizing for misgendering her at work and asking for her real name. After that point, at least she has an ally.

Bahorel started her gender realization as an almost ironic thing. She became a drag queen because "wouldn't it be funny if a guy that looked like me pretended to be a girl???" and somewhere along the way she realized that actually no, it isn't funny. And she's not pretending. Now she's the biggest defender of "cringe is dead". Do things wholeheartedly or don't do them at all.

Jehan is a witchy trans. She knows everyone's star charts (or she thinks she does, Grantaire gave her a fake one to mess with her), and she swears that she can tell who is going to be trans by their star charts alone.

I hope you enjoyed this!!

[aromantic-enjolras]

@p-trichor

[aromantic-enjolras]

Transfem JBR (+Amies) headcanons

Based on a brainrot with @shamedumpster​. Thank you for that!

 Grantaire was never a very social child, but around the age of twelve she basically barricaded herself in her bedroom and got addicted to videogames. That is how she meets Joly and Bossuet, who are her companions and only friends during her teenage years.

 As teenage gamers on LoL do, they use female adjectives as an insult a whole lot. They accuse each other of “playing like a little girl” all the time. Grantaire doesn’t want to admit that she… kind of likes it?

 For the longest time JBR know each other only online, because they live in very different parts of France. They manage to meet a couple of times during family trips, and they decide that when they all get into university in Paris they are going to share an apartment.

 At some point, one of them makes the hesitant confession that she thinks she might be a girl. That creates a snowball effect as the other two basically go “OH THANK GOD I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE”

 They are each other’s support system and they are extremely codependent, but that doesn’t mean they are good for each other. Grantaire is very quick to fall into the reddit rabbitholes of trans women telling each other why they will never pass (”your face is too square, you’re balding, you’re hideous”), and Joly gets stuck in TERF rhetoric about how transition is mutilation and super dangerous. Bossuet is a little more chill, but her way of dealing with the whole trans thing is to joke that she’s a waifu (she can’t take it seriously either) and she enables both of them without realising.

As Grantaire is too busy catastrophizing and wallowing in disphoria and Joly is terrified of everything that can go wrong, Bossuet is the first of them to go on HRT. Of course, she immediately develops an extremely rare allergy and has to stop. (That doesn’t help Joly’s fears).

At some point someone (Musichetta? I like the idea of Musichetta also being someone they met through LoL because she regularly beat their asses) suggests they go to a trans woman support group called “Les Amies du THS” [thérapie hormonale substitutive, aka HRT].

The first meeting almost goes catastrophically wrong. Enjolras refuses to conform to gender norms (”if lesbians can be butch and still be women, then I can too!”), and Grantaire doesn’t know how to react to her. She is attracted to her, but also she resents how she doesn’t seem to care about the things that make her life a living hell. So she reacts in typical Grantaire fashion, and makes a tasteless joke about how “she thought the goal here was to be women?”. Enjolras is two seconds away from throwing them out.

Luckily for them, Bahorel instantly recognizes the kind of aggressive overcompensation she used to do herself (as well as the half-joking “wouldn’t it be funny if I went super feminine??” thing Bossuet has going on) and vouches for them.

Combeferre immediately adopts Joly and works really hard to dispel all the bullshit she has been reading about. It takes a while, but after one point she asks Grantaire to help her block all the pages she usually goes to in order to make herself anxious; that finally gives Grantaire the push to block reddit. They don’t have their own passwords: the only one who can unblock it is the other. It’s not a perfect system, but it works most of the time.

There is more background information about the rest of the Amies, but this is already getting ungodly long, so I’m going to leave it here, and I will write the rest some other time! Hope you liked it!

[aromantic-enjolras]

@p-trichor is transing all his faves this Pride Month so I thought I might re-share my old trans Amies headcanons!!

[alicedrawslesmis]

I was sketching my modern au amis to warm up and I accidentally decided modern AU Bossuet is going bald cause he's going on T and he's like. Well. Better than not being T amirite, fellas?

[alicedrawslesmis]

for some reason the timelapse cut off in 5 seconds? and it didn't record any of the drawing :( but this is what i was doing

[alicedrawslesmis]

cleaned it up a little. the lads (gender neutral)

[aromantic-enjolras]

i love every part of this so fucking much.

[victorianandthespian]

Sometimes I colour things 😌

[aromantic-enjolras]

Looking respectfully :))

[threadbaremillionaire]

A quick sketch of Courfeyrac, Marius, and Feuilly havin a good time.

[aromantic-enjolras]

Always reblog Friends.

[doublepriesticide]

your modern au enjolras should have a criminal record. he should be on watchlists. he should own firearms and know a hundred different ways to make a bomb.

[aromantic-enjolras]

📓

(For the "Tell me about an idea of a fic you will never finish writing" tag game).

Enjolras is a superhero/vigilante. His only problem? His arch-nemesis, his supervillain, is not interested in anything as mundane as taking over the world. No. He wants a date. Enjolras is extremely done with it. I am not sure how to finish it, which is why I have never gotten past the premise, but maybe R realizes that the way into his love's heart is not to threaten civilians if he doesn't agree to a date, it's to kidnap/threaten politicians into passing good laws.

An extract from it because it made @pumpkinspice-prouvaire laugh out loud and that's my proudest achievement in life.

« You got my message, » said the supervillain, sounding like a besotted teenager who had just left a note in his love’s locker, and not like a grown-ass man currently flying several meters above the bridge surrounded by storm clouds and lighting, threatening the lives of many. He seemed to remember himself a moment later, because he drew himself back up, making a lighting explode behind him menacingly and a little melodramatically. « Have you come to see my side of things, once and for all? Have you seen the light and will you meet me at Rino’s Pizza on Friday at 6pm ? »

[drinkwithme-exchange]

hi!! are yall planning to rerun this event this year?

Hi!

We're happy to announce that yes, we will be running it again this year, we will post an announcement with details soon.

[datasupremacy]

Hey, here's a fun new game. Put "📓" or some other version of a book emoji into my inbox and I'll explain the plot of a fanfiction that I haven't written but daydream about.

[aromantic-enjolras]

Please please pleaseeee

[carys-the-ninth]

"The magic system is never fully explained" yeah that's how life works. Imagine having a story set in modern day America and the characters have several pages of exposition on combustion engines and telecommunication networks before we get to the plot

[et-in-arkadia]

i think this is absolutely correct and good writing advice but also victor hugo would like to have a word with you about the parisian sewer system circa 1832

[bendingsignpost]

victor hugo would like to have many words with you about the parisian sewer system circa 1831