#Sorry but playing the Creature as an autistic trans person just hits different

[autismmydearwatson]

Thoughts on Frankenstein

Because I played the Creature:

1. I think Frankenstein was right not to make a wife for the Creature. The Creature is like a child: he spend two years in the woods learning about humanity from a) being attacked by humans, and b) spying on this one particular human family consisting of a father, a son, a daughter, and an Arabian girlfriend. The Creature, like a child, thinks that marriage is the greatest expression of love, romantic or otherwise. Many young children express wanting to marry siblings, parents, friends. This is all in good fun, since they think marriage binds any kind of love. Except the Creature doesn't want love, he wants a friend. His experience with humanity and religion comes from Paradise Lost, in which Eve and Adam were created to be perfectly happy together. The Creature says "I ought to be thy Adam;" but he knows he is unlike Adam because he is hated, alone, and miserable. He thinks if he had an Eve, he would have some semblance of the happiness Adam has.

2. But the thing is, a woman of his kind would not have made him happy. Victor Frankenstein created a living, breathing creature for selfish fulfillment. This backfired when the Creature thought and lived for himself on his terms. Therefore it would not have righted any wrongs for Frankenstein to do it again: to create another living person just to fulfill another's desire for compassion. It would be just as selfish and foolish as the first time. As he reflects in the book, the new woman would have been individual and would be perhaps more violent, or despise the Creature. Refusing to make a woman just to make the Creature happy was, I think, the smartest thing Frankenstein did.

3. On the other hand, after he destroyed the rough draft of the new woman, Frankenstein should have simply forgiven the Creature and adopted him. So maybe he murdered people! The Creature has many times expressed that the reason he is vengeful and violent is because he is miserable. Everyone hates him for no reason, even his father. Frankenstein should have taken back the kid and tried again. Given him a name.

4. Like Adam, the Creature is the first (and only one) of his kind, designed to birth a new glorious people. But Adam was made in God's image: the Creature was made from stolen dead parts that belonged to other living things, once. Adam was beloved by the angels and happy: the Creature was despised by humankind and hurt wherever he went.

5. It's kind of funny how Frankenstein was worried about the Creature and the woman reproducing, cause he really could have just. Spayed her. Conclusion: Victor Frankenstein has no idea how women's bodies work.

6. The theme of Frankenstein that I think everyone overlooks is how certain parents view the act of having children, creating life, as a hobby. And then are shook when the new being expresses signs of individuality, a life, a soul. Ableistic, homophobic parents, "autism moms" always shun their children when the children behave as humans and not as blank slates to influence. Frankenstein created the kid so he could have the credit as the father of a new superhuman species: he ASSEMBLED the boys parts by hand.

"A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I deserved theirs.... if i could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, i might in process of time (although i now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption."

And yet, Victor did not think the Creature was a monster until the MOMENT he showed signs of life.

"How could i describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care i had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and i had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! --Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.....i had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body.... but now that i had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart."

"I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have concieved."

He was a soulless cut of meat and bones (some stolen, some grown), and then, he was alive. He breathed, he opened his eyes. Suddenly he was a monster because he had gone from being a science project to a living soul. He became uncontrollable, not simply a beautiful ideal.

This wasnt the same a mother giving birth, though the sensation of shock might have bern similar. Frankenstein had robbed graves, disturbed sacred places, violated anatomical secrets, "tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay", to make this kid. The kid wasn't grown in a womb, he was assembled from stolen parts, each part with a singular purpose for his creator. Life had grown where it isnt usually supposed to grow. Frankenstein calls his son a monster, but he DESIGNED him. Frankenstein WANTED something from his creation, but his creation couldn't help but be himself, alive, individual.