Reading the Lolita novel I don’t think I was prepared for how much I would…platonically love Lo as a character. She’s so smart and funny and reckless, she’s crass and weird and messy in ways that Humbert fucking hates and I absolutely adore.
I just wanna take reach into the page and set her free to be as bright and beautiful as she already is. She’s trying so hard to survive and keep her sanity, and people find it so easy to judge her based on that.
She’s trapped in a truly horrendous situation, there’s no getting around that if you have an ounce of reading comprehension and she’s by no means a perfect victim, she’s on edge and traumatized and rude and angry and quietly crying for help in ways that people either can’t or aren’t willing to put in the effort to see. She’s a little girl going through hell.
And even then, even through Humbert’s extremely narrow, objectifying gaze, Lo’s personality shines through, stuff that you never get from an aesthetic post about her. She has an IQ of 150. She’s a baby bisexual. She loves comic books. She dances just for herself. She wants to be in the school play. She fixates on pop culture and kitsch as a coping mechanism. There are scenes with her where I could swear I’m reading a description of a 50′s understanding of a character with ADHD.
She forms relationships with other kids, away from Humbert, despite his efforts to control her every move, and even though those relationships are so often stunted and suppressed they’re there, they’re real, she’s real. For all that Humbert tries to control the narrative, Lo still exists as her own person, even if there’s so much of her we’ll never get to see.
I don’t know, I just didn’t really expect for Nabokov to go so hard giving Lo complexity and depth, both as a young female character and a child enduring horrifying, sickening abuse. I wish Lolita was remembered for that instead of the “tragic love” and “coquette” shit.
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