dadvaljean

[dadvaljean]

“The man remained silent for a moment, then said abruptly, ‘So you’ve no mother?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied the child.

Before the man had time to respond she added, ‘I don’t think so. Other people do. But I don’t.’

And after a pause she went on, ‘I think I never had one.’”

(LM 2.3.7)

everything about this exchange kills me. cosette’s simple acceptance of “I don’t” as if her existence as a motherless child is just the way it is. not a mystery, not a tragedy—she just inherently exists outside of other children’s reality.

it’s one small moment, but it encapsulates the age-old attitude that the status-quo will never change, that systems of oppression are simply a natural and unavoidable reality. and that perception squashes any potential to imagine a different way of life.

(only for valjean to show up at the inn all like “actually cosette, you are NOT inherently alone and unloveable, you are NOT destined to an existence of servitude and poverty, there IS another way of life for you and we’re going to go find it together”)

[dadvaljean]

Round 1, Matchup 80: II.i.17 vs II.vii.7

[dadvaljean]

this has probably been done before???

[dadvaljean]

A valvert poetry steal for @lesmisshippingshowdown . It's 115 words!

I've been wanting to write a contrapuntal poem about these two but there is so much possible material for such a poem. And also, writing poetry in English, difficult, oh no. But, I decided to focus on one detail, it being Javert and Valjean both reading about the other drowning from a newspaper. Maybe I will write another one if I'm granted inspiration.

[dadvaljean]

In the words of my beloved: I need Javert beaten, battered, and bruised.

[dadvaljean]

The Les Mis ending we all deserve, feat. Cosette and Tholomyès

[dadvaljean]

Round 1, Matchup 18: I.ii.4 vs V.ii.4

[dadvaljean]

Today's chapter

[dadvaljean]

Themis in Marble

"No one loves the light like the blind man."

[dadvaljean]

Victor Hugo says that Madame Thenardier named Eponine after a heroine from her favorite melodramatic popular women’s romance stories (specifically she’s named after the virtuous Eponina, heroic wife of Sabinus)…..So here’s a poll for what Modern AU Eponine’s name would be.

[dadvaljean]

[dadvaljean]

charity comm for @breadvidence 🙏 actual werewolf javert my beloveddddd

[dadvaljean]

1.5.13 is the moment we can point at to help put to bed the justice vs mercy re-interpretation of Javert and Valjean’s dynamic and the Javert as legalistic fanatic take, and it’s when a lot of the self-representation from Javert we read in 1.5.5 and will hear in 1.6.2 gets countered. A great chapter for me, personally. To ramble about it a li’l, predictably,

So, the justice vs mercy take, right? That’s the musical and it’s a lot of Christian conservatives. You can see this most clearly where we have conservative Christians speaking about the musical and conflating the justice system (human, legal, historical) with Justice (in the context of the Hugolian moral framework, also human!, profoundly nonlegal and ahistorical, divine insofar as Man and the Infinite can be in bed with each other), seeing Javert as Justice, and arguing for his moral superiority, though you’ll find ’em reading the Brick and getting to the same point, somehow. People who hear but the tigers come at night—their voices soft as thunder— and respond “this is the problem with the welfare state” are clearly not existing in the same world of ethics as your average Les Misérables fan, but the musical creates that narrative, right? Javert is morally wrong, there, but here’s this really loving and smart adaptation of the Brick that still looks at his character and reads him as being at core about (flawed) justice. This is good narrative sense. Justice vs mercy is easy punchy. It’s not, I think, what the Brick is doing, because the Brick has room—a lot, lot of room—to be more than quick in its punches.

Thinking this through: if Javert represents (flawed) Justice that could be tempered by Mercy and become a moral man (this is Shoujo Cosette’s happy ending for him, and that of many a fanfic), we’re positing something that doesn’t exist in the Hugolian framework: the justice system as righteous. Whether or not you think there can be a righteous police, I don’t think Les Misérables does—arguably that’s the sum of Javert’s character,  making that point. We pile on these positive characteristics (honesty, self-abnegation, probity) so that we can get to “the evil of the good” or “the evil of goodness” (depending on whether you want the Hapgood or Donougher, 1.8.4): so long as you operate as an agent of this system, you cannot be anything but a part of that evil, an expression of it. 

Look at it this way: “one guy is bad at tempering justice with mercy” is an interesting story if you’re into the guy, but it’s not a sprawling moral point, eh? It’s the characters as symbols and people simultaneously deal. We get “this guy is the hands of the Justice System, applied scrupulously” instead. 

As an aside, a bit: we get a flash of how the justice system (you know, the legal thing, the societal thing) can’t be the solution to vice and violence & Marius’ speedrun of the same thought in 3.8.20, when he realizes by summoning the police he’s committing a person to suffering—and because Marius is a fuck, it took a personal connection and obligation with Thénardier to realize the point, but he still attempts a different solution (which is—still the threat of the cognes, and doesn’t work—certainly not to save Madame T from dying miserably). Note here that Marius doesn’t think, ah shit!, that guy Javert is Flawed Justice Incarnate; he goes, fuck!, it’s going to hurt the guy who saved my dad if the justice system gets its hands on him at all; whether or not the legalistic justice was the most or least tempered by mercy here don’t matter.

… Did I hear someone in back shout ‘get to the part with Fantine, asshole’? All right, all right.

This is the legalistic bit. You may have your autistic legal scholar Javert (genuinely a subtype I find entertaining in fanfic), your ’35, your “the book of regulations are my Bible [. . .] never would I fail in my duty to the law” and “I administer the law: good, bad, or indifferent, it’s no business of mine—but the law to the letter” (Laughton’s Javert is the closest movie representation of a certain stripe of fandom Javert, in this essay I will—), but in 1.5.13 it’s Valjean who quotes the regulations from memory and appeals to the concept of “properly conducted police”: Javert notably doesn’t try to engage with the question at all, but retorts that Fantine is a misérables—he thinks that Fantine’s insult of the mayor is in itself enough to justify her jailing for assaulting Bamatabois (?); when his attempt to remind Madeleine how this game goes (bourgeois-and-the-law as a unit against the misérables) is rejected, he essentially reiterates the same point: it’s his duty to punish insults to the bourgeois by a woman of Fantine’s class regardless of the context (see: Valjean hasn’t contested that Fantine attacked Bamatabois, but who was at fault—Javert is not interested in fault, only insult and class).

How different does 1.5.12 go if Fantine is a bourgeois woman who Bamatabois heckles, eh? And remember: while you could make the argument that Fantine could be doing unregulated sex work, I think it’s a fair bet she’s registered as a filles publique and not breaking the law, here, merely by being on the job.

Now: don’t take this as me saying Javert doesn’t know how to be a properly-conducted police officer. He’s far more educated on that point than Valjean; he understands better than your average dog how to do that trick. And that’s the point.

Which isn’t to say that your ’98 greasy villain Javert is a better adaptation than the musical (god! no); ’98 believes that Javert doesn’t know his business. A good police, says ’98, would know not to use so much hair gel. Again: Brick Javert’s the best at what he does. That’s the point.

[dadvaljean]

les mis fanon ignoring how much of a grade A Hater jean valjean is breaks my heart… bro wasn’t kind because it was easy he was kind because it was hard. he spared javert’s life DESPITE hating him. he carried marius through the sewers DESPITE hating him. the only person he actually loved was cosette, everyone else was neutral at best to him. that’s what makes him compelling: how much he struggles to do the right thing despite his natural disposition toward haterism. canon jean valjean you will always be famous 2 me.

[dadvaljean]

Inspired by this Dracula poll.

[dadvaljean]

Jean Valjean in the first chapters of Les Mis is really serving that “woman in a mobile game ad” energy. It makes you expect to see two buttons that say “HELP HER” and “DIVORCE”

[dadvaljean]

Les Mis 2012 memes I made years ago because some accounts recently liked them, and I forgot how much they made me laugh