mynamesdrstuff replied to your post: Les Mis Adaptations I Would Like to See
I won’t lie, a fair portion of the ‘cant think of a summary title’ had me like 'oh so like a fic then’. So. More fanfics with valjean as an increasingly mysterious presence?
I mean, I would indeed love to see more fanfic deal with Valjean as seen by other people, as a mysterious and sometimes frightening Unknown instead of the Friendly Father Christmas archetype he can sometimes fall into*. There’s a lot to work with there!
But as much as I really enjoy and respect fanfic- no, it’s not really what I was thinking of there?
The thing is that fanfic, very reasonably, tends to (not Always Does, but overwhelmingly Tends To) assume an Informed Audience-that is, an audience that knows the original text to some degree. Unless a fic is setting up some very unusual AU--as in, not just a common Trope Setting Variant-- it usually doesn’t spend time really establishing plot and atmosphere and character knowledge etc etc etc the way original fiction has to.
Which is not only fine, but part of the whole art of fanfic! Knowing how much needs to be restated to set up the scene, and how to make a story that deviates from canon feel “right” without rewriting the whole original text is a skill!
Adaptations never make that assumption-- somehow, even with texts like Les Mis or Shakespeare, adaptations seem to always assume an uninformed audience.
What I really want from that adaptation is not at all a deviation from canon events and details, but a change of framing perspective. I want the Whole World built again from the core up, so that Cosette and Marius become the eyes and ears and voice of the Narrative Normal, the viewer’s window on the world, their assumptions become the viewer’s assumptions, and so on, so that Valjean can feel like an Unknown as the story unfolds.
And the very fact that Les Mis is super well known makes me want that total ground-up reframing, because even people who only know the story tangentially have it in their heads that Valjean is A Good Man-- because he is! We know that! But this would need to build up a world where that can be questioned and feel uncertain to the viewer, right along with Marius. I want unnerving soundtracks and dramatic angles to make Valjean look like he’s Looming and strategic shadows to make him look creepy and everything.
Because part of why I want this version is so that the viewer, along with Marius, can be caught up in the false narrative, the one that makes Valjean look as bad as possible, and share a little bit of the jolt of realizing their own ability to be manipulated by “what is said about a man” as opposed to who he really is and what he’s actually done.
Everyone is prone to that! It’s natural! People all rely on each other for info; none of us can know as much as all of us. But that leaves us vulnerable to exactly the same manipulations of misinformation and coincidence that turn people in M-sur- M against Fantine, and against Madeleine. It’s easy to think the truth is obvious when the eye of the narrative has already spelled it out! But the other characters in the book don’t have that luxury of information--and neither does the audience in the real world.
--there is probably a word for the precise kind of audience<->character sympathy I’m looking for in this but I do not know that word.
ANYWAY ALL THIS TO SAY, I would love to see fanfic dealing with this! But it’s not really a Fanfic Effect that I want from the adaptation, you know?
* i mean, not for nothing--he does explicitly play Father Christmas for Cosette and all- just that I’d like to see more of the other impressions he leaves on people, too.