#hop-frog

[soyrwoo]

...Is there a different animal you associate him with? 🦧

[bowelflies]

Fool's Fire (1992), directed by Julie Taymor

an adaptation of Poe's short story Hop-Frog made using wonderfully grotesque masks and costumes, made for the PBS TV series American Playhouse. for reasons i can't fathom, this doesn't seem to have ever been released on any kind of physical media or streaming service. there is a fuzzy copy on youtube that was taken from a VCR recording of the TV broadcast, which is better than nothing, but still disappointing. i actually just ordered a DVD from some sketchy website out of desperation but i'm willing to bet it's just the same shitty recording burned to a disk. it's worth a shot though

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination - art by Arthur Rackham (1935)

[overdose-art]

DEATH CHASING THE HUMAN FLOCK / THE REVENGE OF HOP-FROG

James Ensor (1860-1949)

[cannondisabledcharacters]

Today’s disabled character of the day is Trippetta from Hop-Frog, who has dwarfism

Requested by Anon

[secretlyatargaryen]

Tyrion Lannister's Literary Connections: The Birthday of the Infanta

There are only a few famous anthologized stories about dwarfs, and I've already talked about Edgar Allen Poe's "Hop-Frog" and its connection to Tyrion's narrative. The other well known story which features a dwarf is Oscar Wilde's "The Birthday of the Infanta," which, like "Hop-Frog," is a story about a court dwarf.

A melancholy king finds that he is unable to make his young daughter happy since the death of his wife. One day, for the princess' birthday, she is given a young dwarf, who dances for her entertainment and whose father sold him to the king. The dwarf is described as exceedingly ugly but unaware of his appearance, and he falls in love with the princess, believing also that she is in love with him, as she and her friends are always laughing in his presence.

One day, the dwarf happens upon his reflection in a mirror, and upon viewing it, realizes that the princess and her friends did not love him, but were laughing because of his ugliness. The dwarf dies right there, and eventually the princess comes upon him and demands that he get up and dance. The court doctor explains that the dwarf has died of a broken heart. In the last line of the story, the princess declares "from now on, let all who come to play with me have no hearts."

Just like with "Hop-Frog," this is a story that GRRM most likely would have read before, and it has some interesting similar themes and motifs as Tyrion's narrative. There's the idea of someone who is described as exceedingly ugly but seeking love anyway. Although Tyrion, unlike the dwarf of Wilde's story, is hyper aware of how people see him. But perhaps the young dwarf boy who loved the princess could be compared to Tyrion as a thirteen year old, who believed whole-heartedly that Tysha loved him, until Tywin and Jaime convinced him that she didn't, that in fact no one could. Tyrion is an amazing character partially because he seeks love and is not treated as an object of pity, though he does have a backstory of horrific abuse. In Wilde's story, we are supposed to have sympathy for the dwarf, but only as an object of pity and faint humor. He is a subject of irony because he does not know that he is ugly. Tyrion, by comparison, knows what he looks like but tries to convince himself that Shae does not see his ugliness, thinking perhaps that she is blind to it. Once he can no longer engage in that illusion, Tyrion tries his best to distance himself from any emotion or feeling. "Let those who come to play with me have no hearts."

What makes Tyrion different from the dwarfs in these stories is that in these stories, though we are meant to sympathize with the dwarf character, it is as object rather than subject. While in Wilde's story, the dwarf is an object of ironic pity, in Poe's story, Hop-Frog is an object of grotesqueness who we are meant to sympathize with, as his revenge is righteous, but his revenge is also meant to inspire horror, and the kind of fear society has of the disabled and the mistreated (see also the movie Freaks). Both stories are meant to point out the inhumanity of the able bodied characters, thus embueing the dwarf characters with the humanity that is denied to them, but that humanity is also limited by making the dwarf an object of comic pity or horror.

Tyrion straddles both of these lines but also dances among them in ways that point out the limits of seeing disabled characters this way. He himself at times plays the role of dwarf as object of pity or horror, especially in ADWD as he takes on the role of mummer both literally and figuratively, making up multiple origin stories for himself (ala "The Killing Joke") that paint him as alternately the dwarf as object of pity or object of horror. But we also have his own internal thoughts and feelings to contrast with the roles society assigns him and those he assigns to himself, which make him move from object to subject in the narrative lens, and that is a big part of what makes him unique as far as literary dwarfs go.

[lgbtqreads]

Inside an Anthology: His Hideous Heart ed. by Dahlia Adler

Inside an Anthology: His Hideous Heart ed. by Dahlia Adler

Well, this is a pretty exciting post for me, considering I’m the editor of this particular anthology! Getting to see different takes on Poe was fun in itself, but getting to see half the collection come back with queer protagonists? Now, that was utterly delightful. I asked the authors of those stories to share a little bit about them, so come check it out!

Edgar Allan Poe may be a hundred and…

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[spine-tinglers]

Hop-Frog. Edgar Allan Poe (1849)

Illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1935)