A Rant About The Phantom of the Opera :P
Something I feel like a lot of people don’t grasp in TPOTO is how much of an incel Erik is. To be clear, I am specifically talking about the book because the musical and everything based off of it really sympathizes with him (and that’s a whole other can of worms).
Erik doesn’t see Christine as an actual human being. Even though he spends the entire book pining for her, he treats her as a prize to be won more than a romantic partner. He kidnaps Christine, saying she is the only one who could ever love him, and uses other people’s lives as leverage to get her to marry him. He criticizes her when she doesn’t meet what his idealistic version of her does. He uses his face as a reason why he ‘deserves’ Christine’s love, saying that he has suffered so much that he is entitled to her. He plans to kill them both if she does ‘decide’ (as stated before- he was using her loved ones as leverage against her so she really didn’t have a choice) to marry him because he knows they could never last. Erik forbids her of interacting with Raoul in any way because he knows Raoul is the one who she is actually interested in.
These are not the actions of a ‘sad boy’ who deserves our pity- this is a fully grown man seizing control of a young woman’s autonomy. Yes, he is tragic. Yes, he has a heart wrenching backstory. But these don’t excuse his actions, under any circumstances. I understand that people sympathize with Erik because all he wants is to be loved, which is an extremely relatable desire, but at the end of the day his actions against Christine were unjustified and cruel.
I can already hear people typing, ‘but Auden! Christine kissed Erik!’ and that still doesn’t equal consent/love. Instead, it shows how forgiving and emotionally intelligent Christine is, with her understanding why Erik kidnapped her and choosing to show him the love the world never did. It wasn’t her falling for Erik. It was her being kind.
When people say ‘Christine should have ended up with The Phantom’ or ‘Erik deserved better’ it erases pain and anguish it put Christine through. It also doesn’t matter that he had a change of heart in the climax, you can’t take away all of the bad things you have done by recognizing they are bad. If Erik would have actively tried to undo the hurt he had caused, I may have a different position, but letting your victims free from your torture is surface level and basic human decency. I don’t think it’s wrong to like Erik as a character, he’s even one of my favorites, but I think people should recognize the hurt he caused people, especially Christine.
