i've been rereading and LOVING your liveblog so far! i haven't caught up to your most recent posts yet but i just had to say i love and cherish your hatred for gohda and your hope that he dies! i had basically the same response to him, but it took a few scenes for me to realize how awful he is, while you got it right away. also OBSESSED with your george characterization, and how you got there by working backwards from his actions!
I’m soooo glad no one gives me shit for my 100% dislike for Gohda. Nasty, nasty man. I have no idea what Ryukishi07 was cooking when creating this character because he seems to be the character with the most shallow personality and no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Also spoilers for my latest liveblog adventures since you haven’t gotten that far yet, but George is in the doghouse at the moment (I got to the Maria’s garden scene and his actions there). I have zero hopes of him getting any better 😔😔
hi, can i have some of your gender thoughts about king lear? i loooove reading your tags and comments and just want to share All The Opinions about edmund finding his gender and his place in the world, while edgar lets *go* of his gender and just a lot of social markers. and!? you mentioned the cordelia character in your retelling is trans!? yes please!!
of course!!! not sure how much more i can offer about edgar and edmund because i wrote up most of those thoughts in these posts which i know you’ve seen dfkhdsfjdsbfs but i just think it maps so well onto the two of their stories. edmund being so so sure of himself and who he is but trapped in a society that makes him an outcast for reasons he can’t control. edgar being the “legitimate son” but having no idea who he really is... it’s trans free real estate it just IS (plus the idea of both of them figuring it out because of each other. edmund wanting to be more like edgar and then edgar wondering if he, perhaps, is like edmund in this way... your fic lives rent free in my head. these two destroy me)
i also think trans edmund (or honestly... any lgbt edmund. shoutout to my dear friend @lesbianedmund for writing - guess what - lesbian edmund fic. lives in my brain) makes it more poignant if goneril and regan are lgbt too!! like!! if the lear sisters are sapphic, if edmund can connect to them on that point of being othered in this society, about fighting tooth and nail in a world that will never accept you, because even if they’re princesses and he’s a bastard what the three of them really are is unloved -- i think it adds to that sense of it being Them Against The World. like, no wonder goneril’s willing to kill her husband over the first person who’s ever made her feel this understood, you know?
(god, this play makes me insane.)
edgar in my Vision TM is always amab, raised gloucester’s Proper Son, but like. he’s nonbinary. he is nonbinary he just IS. edgar i nothing am. edgar leaning into the shedding of all of his identities, “maleness” among them, and becoming someone who is maybe still gloucester’s child but definitely not his legitimate son anymore. and i also think the fool is nonbinary!! because it goes with the whole thing about no one else being able to make sense of them, and the way they straddle various identities without really being a knight or a royal or a servant entirely. and like... we talk about the way the fool and edgar connect out on the heath in terms of madness, feigned or real, and so the idea of them having a moment of connection about gender as well would just be so. it would be so. ;-; (every shakespearean fool is trans prove me wrong. you can’t. feste. touchstone. lear’s fool. all trans)
AND YES my cordelia is trans as well!! not just in my retelling but in the version of king lear that lives in my head. consider: um if cordelia isn’t trans why did lear describe her voice as “soft, gentle, and low” (yes i know low can mean quiet. i know. shh)
ANYWAY this is just me once again pointing the transgenderification beam at every character i like, but i think it really fits in terms of how it could affect
1. her family relationships -- how long did lear raise her thinking he was raising a son? is that part of why he’s so used to depending on her, and why he had the highest hopes for her? did goneril and regan grow up thinking cordelia was separate from them for that reason, because she was a “brother” and a “son” and not One Of Them? is that part of why she seems excluded from their solidarity? (i’m really obsessed with the idea of a lear who got way too attached to his “son”/heir and then once she came out just... didn’t stop favoring her. maybe goneril and regan THOUGHT that now she was their sister it would be different. but it wasn’t! and so they have to wonder if maybe it’s not her gender but just something about her that makes her inherently more lovable than them...)
2. her character, because cordelia’s Main Thing is that she stands up for what she believes and says what she thinks, no matter what she’s Supposed to do. & that transfers (no pun intended) really well into the same kind of self-determination that makes Edmund Trans so powerful imo: it’s the act of standing up and saying, “actually, no matter what you said i was, i’ve made myself into something that is different, and i won’t back down.” (plus... maybe lear handled her coming out all right, and maybe she thought this meant he clearly wouldn’t be mad if she kept telling him the unexpected. and he wasn’t until he was.)
3. the way she and edmund are foils; re: that note of societal resistance and sticking closely to their beliefs despite what the rest of the world says, NOW plus the added point of the two of them transitioning in different directions, and acting, in a way, as mirrors of each other. and that can make it even clearer that edmund, in a lot of ways, is the anticordelia -- unloved and unaccepted, making his way in the world through lies, where she’s beloved until she damns herself with truth. AND of course it can add another note of tension if edmund’s still an outcast and cordelia isn’t. (in my retelling, both the cordelia character and the edmund character are out, but her family accepts her where his father doesn’t, so it’s. messy. very “well of course the golden girl can do what she wants but somehow i’m still a mistake”)
and hey yeah on that note i sure am writing a retelling! it’s fucked up! and obscenely long! and there’s magic in it! and the main characters are varying degrees of gay, trans, and neurodivergent! and i am pushing the edmund-and-cordelia-are-trans-and-also-foils agenda like you’ve never seen so. If You Like This Post You May Well Like That [jazz hands] okay self-promo hour is over but im ALWAYS happy to talk about trans shakespeare and lear is such a play for it, man! such a play!
I think about your Javert Vlog video fairly regularly and cry about it a lot because you really got his character down: the certainty in justice and the inherent absurdity of recognizing Valjean every single time, and how shaken he is at the end, and then the *silence* after he shuts the car door for the last time. It's really really good, and I just rewatched it after reading Javert Derailed and cried some more. Thank you so much for making your videos
aaaaaa wow thank you so much!!! this is such a lovely compliment 😊
"#the Les Amis RPG Character sheets just BOOM there" Can you please tell us what class each of the Amis would be?
HAH okay fun! I’m assuming you mean D&D classes specifically? Note that I’m working more off the spirit and rough general proficiency for all the classes here, rather than looking for exact feats and stats (if anyone tries to bring Math into this I will pretend I did not see it) and going from Les Mis canon setting and info– in a high-fantasy D&Desque setting I think there’d be some tweaking, but this is what we’ve got here! (and I fully expect and invite Debate, especially from people who play a lot of D&D):
Enjolras: Paladin. It’s awkward because Courfeyrac is also (specifically!) a paladin, but that’s just what fits. I’m thinking of mostly 1-3 edition Paladin-type here, but a 5thE Oath of Devotion style would work really well here…
Combeferre: Probably Cleric? On the one hand, definitely Team Healer, and he talks more about religion than nearly anyone else in the book who isn’t specifically ordained or employed by the Church! But with his wide interests , I’m also open to Wizard or nearly any other knowledge-powered Good-aligned class!
Edited: @aporeticelenchus makes this solid argument for the Cleric class for Combeferre:
“The knowledge domain cleric seems like a good fit for Combeferre, or even arcana domain. All the nerdery of wizards with debatably even MORE commitment to learning all the things!“Jean Prouvaire: Bard. Just. Bard. We can talk about special classes and so on but we all know he’s the group bard. Sorry to not have anything more original here but sometimes things are just True.
Feuilly : I’m honestly stumped on this one! We have a good set of combat specifics for Feuilly–he has an eye for battlefield layout, fortification, and probably sharpshooting. Anyone have a suggestion for what would fit that in D&D?
ETA Update: I’ve had several strong suggestions for Artificer Feuilly (specifically Artillerist) , and one for Druid! @aporeticelenchus again:
Besides Artillerist Artificer, other thoughts for Feuilly could be Druid or Oath of the Ancients Paladin. Love of the world without much interest in borders, commitment to kindness and caring, etc. (Feuilly is less interested in nature per se than in the well-being of human kind, but with a few tweaks I think you could get Oath of the Ancients there)
Courfeyrac : Another Paladin! I mean that’s just…there. And it works, with what little detail we have about his fighting and everything we’ve got about him as a character! I like the idea of having Courfeyrac’s cheerful, social version of the Paladin Life in the same party as Enjolras with his Paladin Classic approach :D
Bahorel: Some people are going to expect me to say Barbarian. And maybe I would, if D&D Barbarians were more Fafhrd and less Conan, but they are what they are, and that’s not what Bahorel is. Yes, Bahorel is absolutely one of the team’s Fighters, but what are his real main skills , according to the narrative and his fellow party members? His people skills, his knowledge of the city, his sense of humor, and– by Omniscient Narrative Decree!– words that break everything. His core traits are INT and CHA, not CON and STR.
…He’s a Swashbuckler.
Bossuet: …Also Bard.
People will want to fight me on this and I Welcome It, but listen! While Legle is to all appearances a competent fighter, his main role and contribution in battle is keeping up others’ spirits, and mocking and demoralizing the enemy (…to whatever extent that matters). And definitely the entire rest of his life is heavily built around his verbal and narrative skillset! So yeah, I’m calling Bard on this one.
Joly: Definitely a Cleric, maybe an Apothecary-type specialty?
ETA: there has been a good suggestion from @subsequentibis that Joly would work as an Artificer Alchemist? :i would put joly as an alchemist artificer! they’re pretty decent healers and they get a homunculus which has all kinds of Humorous Potential. although he blows his daily spell slots on ‘purify food and drink’ all the time
Grantaire: …Commoner. With a Sleep feat. SORRY GRANTAIRE try joining the big dramatic adventure-party scene next time!!
(Suggestions have also been made for him being a Bard , but the Worst Bard, which does have potential…)
@aporeticelenchus also suggests:
Not an Amis, but Marius kept inefficiently multiclassing for several levels because he couldn’t decide what to play. He finally ended up stuck with barbarian. (I assume, judging by barricade events. Marius entered a Rage early on and never stopped; survived because of half-damage from all attacks.)
Hmm, it kind of depends on the fandom! For writing, at least, I tend toward AUs with works like Danganronpa... but for Pathologic I’ve written only two AUs...neither of them published, haha.
5. What’s a crackship you love?
We seem to have gotten away from the actual definition of crackship and started calling any rarepair a crackship... I don’t think that I have any true crackships, tbh. I think the last one I had wasn’t even romantic, it was just wanting Sans from Undertale to be friends with Wilson from Don’t Starve.
This was like, five years ago. Don’t even ask.
17. Describe a fic that is still in the ‘ideas’ stage.
Simon & Isidor as mischievous old men who want to remake the town into something better, so Isidor sends for his son to come home and Simon sends for Daniil (who in this AU, is like, a second cousin or something) because they’re trying to set them up. Daniil & Artemy are not amused and go through all sorts of fic tropes trying to fight what Simon & Isidor have decided is fate, but they fall in love anyway.
Canon divergent AU where Fantine decides to pull a heist on Tholomyes to get some deeply deserved child support money. The Tholomyes family fancy themselves patrons of the arts, despite having frankly no idea what An Art even is, so Fantine plans to infiltrate the circle of annoying dandy-esque poets writing insipidly bland poetry that Madame Tholomyes pretends to like. She comes up with a fake identity and disguises herself as a dude, because it’s an all male group and also more cover from her real identity.
Meanwhile, a young Bahorel has also “infiltrated” this group. By which I mean someone saw his slightly long hair (he was trying to grow it out), assumed he was meant to be there, and he stayed for the free finger sandwiches and future parody material.
Fantine and Bahorel team up to scam Tholomyes, Fantine discovers her passion as an author of ridiculous adventure novels, they start prosperous joint writing careers and nobody dies the end.
