#pontmercying

[veryfastnighuncatchable]

When people seriously drag Marius as a character I'm like no no no, only I can bully Marius, who do you think u are?

I'm so mean to him all the time but the second someone else is mean to him it's like *cocks gun* don't talk about my son like that

[butchmariuspontmercy]

dawg look at my lawyer i’m going to jail

[pontmercysamis]

i think i’ve seen almost every les mis character headcanoned as poc (and wonderfully so) but you know what major character i’ve rarely (if never) seen headcanoned as poc?

Marius

i would love to see more poc marius headcanons!!!

sorry if this isn’t well organized, but especially in a modern au, Marius’ narrative fits so well with mixed kid experiences, gillenormand could easily be like a supremacist who doesn’t like georges for being poc, and marius’ whole napoleon era could be retconned to trying to reconnect to your culture when you were not raised in it? there’s so much room for thought here :))

[the-lark-not-the-dove]

MARIUS TALL CONFIRMED

[fremedon]

Brickclub 3.3.5, “The Usefulness of Going to Mass In Becoming a Revolutionary” and 3.3.6, “What Meeting a Churchwarden Can Lead To”

Oh, Marius.

Marius gets radicalized, sort of, by reading actual Napoleonic propaganda and accepting it entirely--which is the entirely predictable result of his realizing how petty and full of shit Gillenormand has been on the subject of his father.

Politics was the only thing Marius had in common with his grandfather, and with that bridge destroyed, there’s nothing--certainly not affection on Marius’s part--tying them together.

Gillenormand, of course, has no inkling any of this is going on and is utterly confident that Marius has a sweetheart. There’s something darkly hilarious in Gillenormand’s certainty that he and Marius are a happy family (because this is how families just are) and that Marius agrees with his view on women, the world, and politics (because those views are objectively correct) and that Marius knows he loves him and would do anything for him (except respect him, allow him to have other family relationships, or refrain from threatening him with physical violence).

But Marius here is like a fundie kid discovering evolution, or sex. He knows now that Gillenormand is wrong about everything, but he has absolutely no ability to to judge sources on their own or to evaluate statements from authority--and his upbringing has certainly not taught him rubrics for separating Bonapartism and Republic, or Napoleon’s good qualities from his bad.

We see here, as @everyonewasabird points out, the easy acceptance of authority that’s going to keep Marius from questioning his received ideas about crime and criminality. And we also see the absolute political naïvete and disengagement that’s going to characterize Marius for the rest of the book--summed up best in this passage:

When by means of these mysterious workings he had shed his old Bourbon and ultra skin entirely, when he had cast off the aristocrat, the Jacobite and the royalist, when he had become thoroughly revolutionary, deeply democratic and almost Republican, he went to an engraver on the Quai des Orfèvres and ordered a hundred calling cards bearing this name: Baron Marius Pontmercy. This was nothing but a very logical consequence of the change that had taken place in him, a change in which everything revolved around his father. Only, as he did not know anyone and could not leave his cards with any porter, he put them in his pocket.

Leaving aside the irony of Marius signifying “casting off the aristocrat” by...embracing his father’s aristocratic title--this is Marius making the mistake he’s going to make in 1830 and just keep making: Thinking of Revolution as an identity and not an act. And a secret identity, at that--something he can solve, once, In His Heart, Where It Matters, and then just... not do anything about. Make calling cards, and not give them to anyone.

Like. You know who is more politically aware and engaged than Marius Pontmercy? Fucking Grantaire. Who is not only aware that his beliefs, or the beliefs he would like to hold, logically entail actions he is not taking, but is being slowly destroyed by the cognitive dissonance!

And, who continues to come week after week to meetings with the people who make him want to change--unlike Marius, who after the Napoleon Incident in a few chapters is going to peace out for three to four years and barely talk politics again to anyone but Cosette.

[the-songs-we-knew]

Les Mis modern AU where instead of being a Bonapartist Marius is a flat-earther

[everyonewasabird]

Like, it’s totally possible Combeferre said “To be free,” turned on his heel, and marched out of the Musain.

But the chapter is from Marius’s POV, so it seems equally plausible to me he was staring at the floor for like forty-five minutes before everybody gave up and left.

[kazuclouds]

it’s barricade day soon. y’all better get ready.