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Christmas is coming, guys ;)

New Christmas themed scorpion and grasshopper design available on

https://timebird. redbubble. com

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Cram-it Daroga, I gotta see if Jonathan Harker is going to finally put 2 and 2 together here.

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Far too many pics of the Palais Garnier (Part Two!)

In October of 2022, I had the extraordinary experience of getting to complete an 15+ year old dream of mine to visit the Palais Garnier. I took a metric fuckton of pictures and now I want to share them with you all, the PotO community!

Before I start dumping, a few things:

Please reblog this post. I usually don’t post a lot, therefore I don’t have a big following. I’d really appreciate people sharing these as much as they can. When I was a dumb kid in ye olden days of the internet, finding a post like this was the sort of thing I would have been hyped up on for weeks. Help spread that kind of joy!

Feel free to use these photos for any sorts of graphics, artistic reference or any other fandom related projects, as long as it’s not for profit. Please just credit me in some way. In fact, I'd love to be tagged to see whatever creations come from sharing all this!

This is part two, which will be photos of the interior. While there, I also took a tour, Mysteries of the Palais Garnier. I'll share a lot of the things I learned throughout the post and try to provide as much context as I can.

Part one, the exterior images can be found HERE.

Upon leaving the designated tour office area, we entered this large, circular room where our tour began. Giant mirrors lined the walls and one of my companions immediately remarked that she felt as though someone was watching her from behind them.

On the ceiling there was this intricate pattern. We learned that this was Charles Garnier's "signature". He was concerned that at some point in time, his name would be forgotten and he would no longer be remembered as the architect of the Opera. If you look closely, his name is intertwined in the design, as well as the years of the building's construction.

There are salamanders hidden throughout the building as they were said to ward off devastating fires. It was very common for theaters to burn down, then. In fact, the construction of the Garnier was somewhat rushed in the last few years because the company's previous theater, Salle le Peletier burned to the ground in 1873. The Garnier opened in 1875.

We learned in our tour that these cracks on the steps were the result of a great tragedy. A group of ballerinas had been exploring the roof when the glass on the large window above cracked. One ballerina fell through the window and met her demise on the steps below.

With all these pictures of doors to the private boxes, you're probably wondering, "Hey Lotus, what about the most important one?" I got you, boo.

PART ONE (exterior), PART THREE (coming soon)

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Christina Nilsson: One of the Victorian era’s most famous divas.

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Reblogs are highly appreciated!

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Available on many more items!

Reblogs are highly appreciated!

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This is how it all began! On Thursday, 23 September, 1909, the first section of Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l'Opéra was printed on page 3 in the feuilleton section of the Parisian daily newspaper, Le Gaulois.

Le Fantôme de l'Opéra ran for 15 weeks, from 23 September, 1909, to 8 January, 1910, and was printed in 68 sections. To celebrate 105 years of Phantom in print, I will be posting all 68 sections of Leroux’s novel on each day that Phantom originally appeared in Le Gaulois.

This first section includes the text of the Avant-Propos (Foreword) from Leroux’s novel (I’ve included it as a single panel, and as two panels for easier reading). To read my translation of the Foreword, click here.

Click here to see the entire edition of Le Gaulois from 23 September, 1909. This link brings you to page 3 of the newspaper – Le Fantôme is at the bottom of the page. Click on the big green arrows towards the top of the webpage to turn the pages of the newspaper, and click on the magnifying glass icon at the top left to zoom.

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My most successful PotO design now available on several new items for your pet!

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Reblogs are highly appreciated!

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The Commune in Kay

I finished Susan Kay’s Phantom just a few months ago. I wanted to highlight Kay’s interpretation of Erik’s Commune experience as there is a lot I think she got right. And a lot she didn’t. 

I agree with Kay that Erik must have been in Paris at the time of the 1871 Paris Commune as the Palais Garnier was nearly a completed structure by this time. If Erik worked on the foundations, he must have been there from the beginning, in 1861. Kay writes that Erik is already living in the cellar when the Commune began. It made the perfect hideout. 

But I disagree with Kay that Erik would have stayed hidden for the entirety of the Commune. I think at the very least he would have come out to watch the fires at the end. I think Erik delights in chaos - which is why he is always creating it. I don’t think he would have cared about the Commune politically, but I think he would have been very much interested in the arson. 

Does Erik have a political worldview? For all the references to the Commune and anarchy that Leroux slipped into his character, Erik doesn’t seem to stand for anything other than himself. Or rather, he represents so much as to be a mess of a character. Leroux associates him with the Commune and with anarchic terrorism (the chandelier, the threat to explode the Opera) yet what Erik seems to desire most is to be part of the bourgeoisie. He crashes a fancy dinner party, he decorates his home with care, he yearns to be seen walking in the park with a pretty wife. These are not the desires of an anarchist. He is everything at once and therefore completely mysterious. Kay’s Erik’s singular focus seems to be his own internal angst. It makes sense that Kerik pretty much ignores the Commune. Except for that one Communard he kills in the cellar. 

Kay didn’t seem to do as much research on the Commune chapters as she did for some of the other sections of her novel. Although, at the time she wrote her story research was much harder; she didn’t have the luxury of the internet and Google translate. But it’s clear she didn’t find this topic interesting or important to her story. See the above excerpt. The Commune didn’t surrender. It was defeated, massacred. Many many people died. I can’t imagine that anyone was over the horror of it in a mere month. The city itself had suffered physical trauma that would take years to rebuild. But Kay moves her story forward quickly. Erik has a soprano to meet. 

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From The Complete Phantom of the Opera by George Perry, 1987

The Introduction of The Phantom of the Opera is pure brilliance. Leroux writes in the first person, signs it G.L., his own initials. He intertwines details that are real, details that are convincing, and total fiction such that the reader cannot really tell what might actually exist under the Palais Garnier. 

Realizing that G.L. is not Leroux and that the Introduction is not an author’s note, but rather the beginning of the strange tale, was a revelation to me. Leroux begs us to actively disbelieve him. And we should.

Leroux’s style birthed a myth that continues to confound our sense of reality. We want to believe Erik was a real person. Or at least, that Leroux really did find a skeleton down there, didn’t he? And if the lake is real, then isn’t the Communard dungeon real too? The one where G.L. saw the initials R.C. scratched into the wall? It all really happened, didn’t it?

In the above page from The Complete Phantom of the Opera, author George Perry seems to believe that Leroux really did find a skeleton down there and that the body really was somehow connected to the Commune. But using Leroux as a reference to back-up Leroux’s own claims is treading on unstable ground. 

It is canon that there is a Communard dungeon beneath the Garnier. That doesn’t make it history. 

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Cram-it Daroga, I gotta see if Jonathan Harker is going to finally put 2 and 2 together here.

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So have any females ever tried to join the club such as elphaba?

I get this question a lot and while I ADORE Wicked and especially Elphaba, I'm sort of leaning more into literary characters, and the Elphaba we know is kind of a far cry from the original Frank Baum's one-eyed witch. But! I do know another classic lady of antiquity who might do nicely...

Get it gurl

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Erik is sooo unhappy…

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Phantom of the Opera x Nightmare Before Christmas

(click for better quality)

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"Now you are here with me, no second thoughts - you've decided..."

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An Interview on Phantom, with Susan Kay

Back in 1993 I wrote a fan letter to Susan Kay, and asked if she’d be willing to give me an interview for the Phantom Appreciation Society fanzine. So this is the interview she gave me, by letter, published in “Masquerade” issue 4, Spring 1994. (Masquerade and Beneath the Mask were the same zine, it just changed name on issue 5 as I discovered there was already a musicals zine called Masquerade.)

AN INTERVIEW WITH SUSAN KAY

When and how did you first become interested in the story or the Phantom?

My first contact with the Phantom was a chance purchase of the soundtrack of the Lloyd Webber musical. The music took me to the London production and the show took me to the original Gaston Leroux novel, which I hoped would satisfy the immense appetite I had developed for further knowledge of the character. My reaction to the book was a mixture of disappointment and fascination. It told me so much less than I had hoped for, and yet the little there was intrigued me even further: the odd paragraph here, the throwaway line there which mentioned the Phantom’s earlier life. Increasingly the last two pages of Leroux’s book began to read to me like the plot of another story, a story which refused to go away and clamoured ever more incessantly to be written.

Do you think that Leroux’s novel was based on a true story?

It’s very tempting to think so.

How many times have you seen the Lloyd Webber show?

I’ve seen it ten times in all. Six times in London, twice in Los Angeles, and twice in Hamburg where I was the guest of the German Phantom, Thomas Schulze.

Do you still see it?

The last time I saw the musical in England was in London in April 1991. The following day “Phantom” was announced Romantic Novel of the Year at the RNA awards luncheon, so perhaps that particular show was a good omen for me.

Who is your favourite Phantom?

Michael Crawford was wonderful, and I found Dave Willetts very powerful. Anyone who has the opportunity should try to see Thomas Schulze in the Hamburg production.

How did you create the character of Erik in your book?

When I came to examine the character myself I came to the conclusion that the real tragedy of his life was not his disfigurement. but his complete inability to accept that his mother had ever loved him. This fatal belief warped his whole existence and rendered him incapable of recognizing love even when it was staring him in the face, whether it was the first infatuation of a young girl, the dark desire of an older woman, the affection of a friend, or the real admiration of those who came to work with or serve him in one capacity or another. This idea became central to the whole storyline, leading inexorably to one tragedy after another. Certainly his life was shaped by the rejection of society, horrific experience and some cruel twists of fate, but ultimately this was always a character relentlessly set on a course of self-destruction. I also felt that, in spite of the terrible crimes he commits during the course of his life, the Phantom was neither a psychopath nor an inherently evil man. In order to make that last act of self-sacrifice for the sake of love there must always have been an essential core of good within the character. Leroux himself allowed his Phantom certain traits of kindness, humour and civilized behaviour. I felt that essentially this was a fiercely proud man who came to desire his own human dignity to an almost insane degree and would go to any lengths to protect it. Couple this with the unstable temperament that often accompanies pure genius and you have a very dangerous man, a man capable of killing for a real or imagined slight even the people he most desperately loves. Those attracted to him are always rightly aware of an underlying fear, and I believe it is this mixture of attraction and fear which is responsible for his powerful sexuality. It’s what separates the Phantom from Raoul and all the other nice young boys like him who offer a safe mundane existence to a woman, but no thrills or chills.

What was the most difficult part of the book to write?

The first two sections dealing with his childhood were the most straight-forward. The sections from Rome through to the building of the Opera House were very demanding from the point of research, some of which was obscure and hard to obtain. But the section I found most hard to actually write was the part of the story which directly overlaps Leroux’s. It’s very difficult to trespass nonchalantly over someone else’s story, particularly when it has been adapted so many times in different mediums. I had to dispense with a lot of inhibitions, the chief of which was “"How can I ever dare to meddle with this?”

What would you have done if you were Christine?

I think I would have had to do what she did in the book, and go back that one last time to make things right. It would have been a terrible thing to live with otherwise: it would have destroyed both her and Raoul in the end.

See also: the original UK paperback cover art for Kay’s Phantom, and some nice tarot-style art from a magazine at the time.