Extensive Les Mis fanon character interpretation Discourse under the cut, read at your own risk
I’ve been thinking about this for an embarrassingly long while and I know I’m not the best person to discuss this, because talking about Les Mis is like opening this huge box of things which you need to be a scholar to be prepared to back up fully. That’s why this is under ‘read more’, because I am aware and accept my own ignorance and limitations BUT I also think this is an interesting topic, so here we go.
One thing that has been increasingly bothering me in what we can call “the current fanon interpretation” of Les Mis, namely the fanon interpretation that arose/became popular post 2012 movie and through tumblr/ao3, is this idea that Enjolras is a toxic person and he tramples selfishly over people’s feelings.
This is something that escalates sometimes a lot, even to a point in which I had to one time witness someone on tumblr dot com saying that Montparnasse was a better person and preferable ship partner than Enjolras which made me just stop and stare at the screen for a long moment trying to comprehend where this was coming from.
There was an escalating fandom acceptance of Enjolras being incredibly selfish towards people in the benefit of “his cause”, which makes him a sort of childish persona who is unable to take care of himself and who doesn’t understand people’s feelings in the slightest.
This is 99.999999% of the time paired with Grantaire’s interpretation, which I think is a key to understanding why this happened in the first place and why it evolved into turning Enjolras into an unfeeling person who understands nothing of human emotions.
And I think it’s a fascinating thing to think about and deconstruct, even if I’m not fond of the interpretation.
I think that Grantaire is, to the current Les Mis fandom (more so than ever before, but I’ll talk about that in a bit), what Éponine was to the musical fandom (and creators) in the 80s/90s.
A big problem I have with Éponine’s interpretation in the musical (and again, I’m in no way the most qualified person to talk about this and my word should be taken with a bucket of salt) is that she was taken as the victim in a made up “love triangle” that never was. The musical uses Éponine as a tragic figure whose love for Marius is depicted as wholesome and romanticized, whereas Cosette is reduced to a Cinderella story and a very shallow characterization once she becomes an adult (let’s remember her storyline is reduced to being an object to Fantine’s hope, Valejan’s salvation and Marius’s survival without much of an own agency since her entire plot and growth and storyline are cut after she’s rescued by Valjean). So the musical puts the two against each other as the two “options” Marius has, but doesn’t focus on Marius and Cosette’s relationship aside from a couple songs and moments, instead gives Éponine a solo on how much she’s unrequited and a death scene where the entire plot point of her wanting Marius to go to the barricade is erased.
Éponine’s character complexity is reduced to the character people is meant to feel for and women are meant to root for because she is “the underdog”. And, most often that not, that’s what love triangles do, the underdog is the one people root for because they’re meant to identify with their unfair situation and their tough luck.
This is a disservice to Éponine and to Cosette, who are much more complex than this and it’s something most people tend to let pass because the musical didn’t have as much time to expand, but it isn’t a matter of amount of content depicted but on which perspective to focus and what lens to see the story through.
Ask anyone who was a fan of the musical in the 80s and who hasn’t read the book or seen any other adaptation who they prefer between Éponine and Cosette, if you don’t believe me. I mean, On My Own was adopted as the “anthem of the female friendzone” as cringe-y as hell as that sounds.
Anyway, what does that have to do with Grantaire, you ask me? Well, first of, it’s very easy to see how modern fandom tends to interpret Grantaire and Éponine as friends, really really close to one another. This is a very common occurrence that results from the comparison of their situations and strengthens my point, but it’s not where I’m going with exactly.
What I think that has happened with Grantaire, and here is the anthropological/sociological hypothesis nobody asked for, is that he became the embraced character for the current tumblr/ao3 fandom as Éponine was for that 80s/90s musical fandom, due to the interpretation he is given, to satisfy certain fandom needs that are current. Which isn’t wrong in itself, it’s what happens with archetypes all the time (and a subject of study for me, which is why this interests me specifically, I’m currently writing two projects that involve literary archetypes, but I digress).
Grantaire’s drunkenness and confrontational nature were turned into coping mechanisms for a battle with severe depression, in most cases, or other underlying mental illnesses. Which isn’t that much of a long shot in itself, all things considered, it has a canon basis to stand on, but creates a complex case when it comes to the consequences of the things he does.
Fanon transformed Grantaire’s confrontational nature into a constant cry for help, one which Enjolras most often, if not almost always, ignores. Sometimes out of being oblivious, sometimes out of selfishness, sometimes out of derision and contempt. Sometimes all of them at once.
And one consequence of this was that it started becoming more and more often for Grantaire’s actions to be fully embraced by fandom because he was starting to be conceived as a vessel for a lot of self-reflection. It isn’t completely random that Grantaire’s characterization became more inclined towards the narrative of mental illness and conflicting coping mechanisms, because they are all subjects we talk about more openly now than ever before, especially in the platforms where this interpretation is more often seen, namely tumblr and ao3. Not that they didn’t exist before, but that they’re discussed more freely now, especially through the idea of safe zones that social media and the internet in general allow.
What Éponine’s character was for the female fandom of the 80s looking for an underdog to root for, in a market filled with products about the female underdog who was unrequited and deserved to be loved, Grantaire somewhat became to a fandom needing to express this idea of existential emptiness and overall doubt about not only one’s state of mind but also where one is going with their life when others seem so certain about it.
And talking about being certain about a life goal, what’s going in with Enjolras, meanwhile? I believe that, much like Grantaire’s fandom characterization having somewhere canon to stand on, Enjolras’s severity has some places where it came from which we can all clearly see. I am a little bit tired of how many times people use the “capable of being terrible” phrase at this point, and then there was the whole thing with Saint Just which I’m not getting into because this is already too long.
But, much like characters written to be two sides of the same coin, Enjolras and Grantaire tend to be connected to each other’s characterization. They were like that in canon, they were written to be a pair which influenced, directly or indirectly, the other, so it isn’t strange to see that in fanon interpretations, the two also go hand in hand. Pun very much intended.
The issue I have with Grantaire’s interpretation isn’t that his perspective is more directly viewed, or that fandom goes more in-depth with his underlying issues, but the fact that sometimes identification turns into idealization. It happens very frequently in writing (and not only in fic) that authors who see themselves reflected in a character tend to try to erase any blame from them in a way to channel a sense of embrace for their own actions, and that can be counterproductive to the character’s complexity.
Because it isn’t really the problems and hardship what make a character relatable, it is their growth which comes from learning, which, in turn, comes from making mistakes.
When Grantaire’s mistakes are characterized as reactions to things that are outside his capability to control, when they are seen as mechanisms of what anyone would do if they were in his place, Enjolras’s reactions to them turn not severe but unfair.
Suddenly, all of Grantaire’s mistakes, jokes, derision and his unfavorable actions are seen as a product of an inescapable situation, out of his control, which, in turn makes Enjolras’s anger unjust and an over-reaction. Which, paired with the fact that Enjolras’s “cause” varies from interpretation to interpretation (especially in modern contexts, which are the most popular among this generation of fandom, where the “cause” has to be determined from social and political contexts that tend to be very vague out of the global state of the world and the intersectionality of issues, which overlay in every one of them), makes him unfairly distant and overall incapable of feeling empathy.
Something that can be seen very clearly in the way in which, when it’s written as a ship, Enjolras often has to “choose” between Grantaire and “his cause”, whatever that is in each specific narrative.
More so than making Enjolras too severe, my problem is with his desensitization. I feel that making Grantaire a constant victim (out of fandom willingness to grab onto him as a vessel of current issues of the generation he represents due to his canon-ish age) makes Enjolras desensitized to human emotion, especially because, most often than not, it is only him who is represented as oblivious or uncaring, while the rest of the group understands and sometimes even defends Grantaire, in stances even turning their backs on Enjolras for that reason, which always baffles me, truly.
Enjolras is a very complex character and his actions are matter of many essays and interpretations, but one thing I don’t think he can be seen as is uncaring. Even less so uncaring towards human emotion. His constant inner turmoil during the barricade is something to behold and I always turn to his decision to execute Le Cabuc/Claquesous as one of my favorite parts in the entire thing, and the fact that he grieves his decision in the way he does is a proof of his emotional complexity and empathy.
I don’t have a problem with Enjolras’s severity or Grantaire’s motives, I have a problem with the simplification of their narratives into a judge and a victim, which I think is what leads to these conversations of toxicity among them, opening another bag of complications.
But even if it’s something that bothers me, it also fascinates me to see how these interpretations shift so much and how they change according to the audience that embraces the text at a certain point in time. How we charge it with additional symbolic value as we go, transforming it a bit with each read.
I want to clarify, very strongly and vehemently, that these ramblings are IN NO WAY meant as derision of fandom interpretation or anyone’s particular writing. I too have written Les Mis fics and have fallen into interpretative conundrums that now, with experience, I judge unfitting to my current views, some which I have deleted, others which are still around. So this is in no way a call out of any form, not at all.
It is also not to criticize Grantaire’s interpretation, as someone who suffers from mental illness myself, I find it not only positive but necessary the inclusion of these topics in writing, whether it is in fic form or in any other type.
I find this a fascinating topic because, like Tournier said: “In some masterpieces - and that is why they are first among universal literature - there is an incentive to create, an infection of the creative verb, a way to put in motion the creative process of readers. I confess that, for me, that is the peak of art”. That is the magic of works like Les Mis, that we can use them to see ourselves, no matter how much time has passed, and if these characters still help to see ourselves and our reality in a way in which we can observe it better, I think Hugo would be glad.
