#Valjean is...evil

[24601orwhatever]

imagine ur Marius and ur life was just saved by ur future father in law who so tenderly cared for you and even referred to you as “son” but the moment u became fully conscious he’s decided he barely even knows you and can’t even look you in the eye even though all you ever wanted was a father

BUY @medium-observation ‘S VIDEO WHEN THIS COMES OUT YALL

[bugpoolz]

WHYYYYY DID HE DO THAT 💔💔

[freakyvampirequeer]

if you really think about it valvert is just lawlight if L was the crazier one and also if they were old.

[pilferingapples]

y'all y'all

Les Mis 2000 is not very good

[hadleysmis]

As a pun for Aa Mujyou, there was a TV show that was called Ai Mujyou (love, misery). I'm guessing it was a pun of this character 噫 being replaced with this character 愛 ('disappointed interjection (e.g. Alas!)' and 'love' respectively).

In 1988, Tokai Television and Fuji Television broadcasted Ai Mujyou. Its formal title was 『日本ジャン・バルジャン物語 愛無情』 [Japanese tale of Jean Valjean: ai mujyou].

概要

ヴィクトル・ユーゴーの『レ・ミゼラブル』（ああ無情）を��作とし、これを明治末期から昭和初期の日本（静岡・牧の原台地と東京）を舞台とした物語へと脚色されたもの。ジャン・バルジャンに相当する主人公（神崎士郎）が神父との出会いの時点では改心せず、東京で偽名を使い事業を始めた時も目的は自分を陥れた者への復讐であるなど、独自の展開も見られる（改心したのは番組が折り返し点を過ぎてからであった）。

Summary

Adapted from Victor Hugo's 'Les Misérables', this story takes place in the late Meiji period to the early Shouwa period in Japan (specifically Shizuoka and Toukyou).

Kanzaki Shirou corresponds Jean Valjean, and he does not reform from having met the Catholic priest, and instead learns to reform at the mid point of the story.

After having met the priest, Jean Valjean starts a business in Toukyou under a false name.

Kanzaki's main goal is to enact revenge on those who have wronged him.

[demon4dilfs]

my questionable movie choice tonight was solarbabies (1986) in which richard jordan (jean valjean from les mis 1978) tortures terrence mann. im....

dark universe valvert

[kiyomitakada]

So the main conceit of my one Death Note WIP is that it's told from Yotsuba!Light's POV so all the pre-Yotsuba stuff is rewritten from a perspective where Light never became Kira. Anyway sometimes I'll straight-up forget that Light isn't innocent. Like what do you mean he wasn't just sitting there while Lind L. Tailor was mysteriously killed by an unseen force? What do you mean he had ulterior motives for going on a date with Yuri besides comphet? What do you mean he watched Raye Penber die he didn't find out about that until his dad announced it at the dinner table

GHDKFJDHGKH god i have to read presupposition i know i'll love it… i imagine this is how post-canon matsuda feels. sometimes. but yeah it happens to me too if i read or write too much yotsuba light. primadonna amv is usually a good cure though

[secretmellowblog]

I see a lot of people claim that “Thenardier is the real villain of Les mis and not Javert” and my hot take is that this is completely wrong and fundamentally misses the point of the source material. Thenardier is a crucial character foil to Jean Valjean, and it’s very important that Jean Valjean sees Thenardier as the person he could’ve become in different circumstances. Jean Valjean uses some of his last words on his deathbed to urge pity and forgiveness for Thenardier, because he identifies so strongly with his poverty, criminality, and desperate misplaced rage. Les Miserables is not a novel about how a single evil criminal is the cause of all society’s problems, and in fact that’s antithetical to the entire point.

Thenardier is dangerous specifically because he’s able to take advantage of existing social structures-—like exploiting Fantine’s poverty, abusing the wife and daughters who are under his thumb as a patriarch, weaponizing the threat of the police against Jean Valjean.Thenardier correctly identifies he lives in a bigoted unequal society, but instead of trying to eliminate inequality, he dreams of being the person on top who gets to crush everyone beneath him. He’s cruel, greedy, and evil— But the things that make him powerful aren’t things that he created.

Thenardier and Javert are equally “evil” characters and equally important as character foils to Jean Valjean. The main difference is that Thenardier never has the catastrophic change of heart that Javert does, so people find him less sympathetic. If thenardier tragically repented instead of becoming worse and even more bigoted, he WOULD be a tumblr sexyman, but nobody is ready for that conversation. XD

And, to be really spicy, I think people are also far more quick to excuse violence committed “in service of the law” vs violence committed “criminally,” even if they have the same result? Thenardier and Javert both enthusiastically participate in abusing and killing Fantine, but I’ve never seen people downplay Thenardier’s role the way they do with Javert. Thenardier nearly kills Jean Valjean in the gorbeau ambush, but Javert kills or nearly kills lots of characters (including Jean Valjean) throughout the story, by sending them to prison where they’re given harsh inhumane sentences. Javert and Thenardier are both described as bigots who enthusiastically crush people who are on the lower rungs of society, and who feel comfortable abusing those people because they believe they’re inherently lesser. And I think part of why people say “thenardier is the real villain” is because Javert’s abuse is done in the service of Enforcing the Law and Social Hierarchies, which people consider an inherently a more noble/selfless motivation— even as Hugo repeatedly describes it as horrible, petty,& pathetic.

TLDR: Whenever I’m back on the Les Mis fanfic grind, I’ll finally deliver the toxic Valjean/Thenardier/Javert love triangle the world needs —

[sarahreesbrennan]

Are all the themes in “in other lands” supposed to be a commentary on something? Or do you just like writing sex scenes between minors, age gaps, and reverse misogyny?

Genuine question.

Ohhh, my dear anon, I don't believe this is a genuine question.

But it does bring up something I've been meaning to talk about. So I'll take the bait.

Firstly. Yes, my work contains a commentary on the world around us. I wonder what I could be doing with the child soldiers being sexually active in their teens (people hook up right after battles), and the age gap relationship ending in the younger one being too mature for the elder. What could I possibly have been attempting when I said 'how absurd gender roles are, when projected onto people we haven't been accustomed by our own society to see that way'? I wasn't being subtle, that's for sure.

Secondly. Yes I do enjoy writing! I think I should, it's my life's work. Am I titillated by my own writing, no - though I think it's fine to be. The sex scenes of In Other Lands aren't especially titillating, to be honest. It is interesting to me how often people sneer at women for writing romance and sex scenes, having 'book boyfriends,' insinuating women writers fancy their own characters. Women having too much immoral fun! Whereas men clearly write about sex for high literary purposes.

… I have to say from my experience of women and men's writing, I haven't found that to be true.

I’m not in this to have an internet argument. Mostly people use bad faith takes to poke at others from the other side of a screen for kicks. But I do know some truly internalise the attitude that writing certain things is wrong, that anyone who makes mistakes must be shunned as impure, and that is a deeply Victorian and restrictive attitude that guarantees unhappiness.

I've become increasingly troubled by the very binary and extreme ways of thinking I see arising on the internet. They come naturally from people being in echo chambers, becoming hostile to differing opinions, and the age-old conundrum of wanting to be good, fearing you aren't, and making the futile effort to be free of sin. It makes me think of Tennyson, who when travelling through Ireland at the time of the Great Famine, said nobody should talk about the 'Irish distress' to him and insisted the window shades of his carriage be shut as he went from castle to castle. So he wouldn't see the bodies. But that didn't make the bodies cease to be.

In Les Mis, Victor Hugo explores why someone might steal, what that means about them and their circumstances, and who they might be - and explores why someone else is made terribly unhappy, and endangers others, through their own too rigid adherence to judgement and condemnation without pity. The story understands both Jean Valjean the thief and Javert the policeman. Javert’s way of thinking is the one that inevitably leads to tragedy.

Depiction isn't endorsement. Depiction is discussion.

Many of my loved ones have had widely varying relationships to and experience of sex (including 'none'). They've felt all different types of ways about it. If writing about them is not permissible, I close them out. I'd much rather a dialogue be open than closed.

I do understand the urge to write what seems right to others. I've been brain-poisoned that way myself. I used to worry so much about my female characters doing the wrong things, because then they'd be justly hated! Then I noted which of my writer friends had people love their female characters the most - and it was the one who wrote their female characters as screwing up massively, making rash and sometimes wrong decisions. Who wrote them as people. Because that's what people do. That's what feels true to readers.

I want my characters to feel true to readers. I want my characters to react in messy ways to imperfect situations. I love fantasy, I love wild action and I love deep thought, and I want to engage. That's what In Other Lands is about. That's even more what Long Live Evil is about. That sexy lady who sashays in to have sexy sex with the hero - what is her deal? Someone who tricks and lies to others - why are they doing that, how did they get so skilled at it? What makes one person cruelly judgemental, and another ignore all boundaries? What makes Carmen Maria Machado describe ‘fictional queer villains’ as ‘by far the most interesting characters’? What irritates people about women having a great time? What attracts us to power, to fiction, and to transgression?

I don’t know the answers to all those questions, but I know I want to explore them. And I know one more thing.

If the moral thing to do is shut people out and shut people up? Count me among the villains.

[lesbianslugreaction]

Evil Jean Valjean be like: Just because I'm dating Javert doesn't mean I lay any claim on him. He's allowed to go out, meet people and grow close to them. Other people are allowed to be attracted to him, just as he is allowed to be attracted to them. I recognise that any feelings of jealousy stem from insecurity and low self-esteem, and whenever they arise I will communicate clearly with my partner and attend couples counseling if needed. I understand that I do not own Javert; he is his own person and is neither my property nor my sweet little honey puppy babygirl who belongs solely to me. I am a well-adjusted individual and a non-controlling partner.

Evil Javert be like: I'm a dom.

[planetarytransformation]

Tier list of Les Mis characters based on how good it would be if a trans woman played them

---

F tier

Gavroche: Too sad. Also weird that a bunch of students are keeping a nine-year-old trans girl around.

Marius: Eddie Redmayne isn’t allowed to do that shit to us again.

D tier

Cosette: Chaser Marius is funnier than chaser Cosette, but still not that fun. The trans girls I know are getting tied down and spit in, not having saccharine romances with dapper young gentlemen. Fundamentally inhospitable to a trans reading.

Fantine: Oh, how bold. A trans woman gets fired from her job, cuts her hair, becomes a sex worker, then dies of an STI while penniless from child support. I actually got a little sick writing that. Please don’t do this.

Thenardier: Yeah, yeah, what if the evil criminal and child abuser was also a faggot with it. A trans woman would absolutely knock the audience dead with Master of the House, but things just get ugly in the second act as the corpses of these brave little cis boys get picked over by some crossdressing creep. Not as fun as it seems.

C tier

Mme. Thenardier: Only funny because then you get to have Chaser Thenardier, and frankly that suits his character well enough that I want it to happen.

Jean Valjean: I’m tired of trans people having to be self-sacrificing. Jeanne Neovaljeana is the story of a community workhorse being ridden to death, giving up the respectability she spent years clawing back, carrying her cis daughter’s cis boyfriend out through a sewer, and then dying on the wedding day. Stupid!

B tier

Javert: Not a conventional pick, but Javert turns to the law as a source of stability in a morally unsettled universe, and I think that that contradiction would be further complicated by her being transgender. Plus, then her fight with Valjean in Act 1 makes a point about trans women in sports. Honestly, there’s an argument that the character as is has some serious repressor energy – she even kills herself at the end!

The Bishop: Now we’re talking. Extending mercy to a man who robbed you and changing the course of his life is like a sublimated version of what happens to a guy the first time he gets topped. She is the most powerful person in every scene she’s in, and she deserves it. Great pick.

A tier

Enjolras: Come on now, think about it. Leader of the revolutionaries, bohemian philosopher-turned-soldier. Just picture her at the top of that barricade, brown corset over white blouse, curly hair over her shoulders, lipstick matching the red of the French flag as she waves it. I have to stop describing this because I’m getting a little too worked up.

Grantaire: Okay, okay, I get it. You want to do a transgressive casting, but you can’t make the noble revolutionary hero look too AGP. How about his slovenly, lecherous sidekick? Only makes sense that a tgirl in 19th-century France would develop a drinking habit, and she gets some fun lines to boot.

Eponine: Every trans woman I know has fantasized about dying in the arms of her unrequited lover. A Little Fall of Rain already makes me misty; watching one of my sisters sing it would absolutely break me. She even does tactical boymoding at one point; god, the casting writes itself. Phenomenal choice.

Conclusion

Everyone dies in this fucking play, but some people die well and others die badly; fundamentally, the casting must impart dignity. It’s hard to get that as a trans woman in theater. Be brave.

[breadvidence]

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.

[javussyannihilator]

javert love fest 💕

because damn if anyone ever needed and deserved one…

anyway a very simple prompt—share in tags, comments, or notes one of your favorite good or funny or enjoyable things about javert 🎩

can be a quote, scene, characteristic, etc. even a headcanon. like i love that he’s valjean’s specialest pillow princess 😌 

(more seriously, his persistent nonviolence and how he avoids using weapons in any weapon-y sort of way is great and too often overlooked.)

so yes, sound off in comments and reblogs, what’s something you really like about javert?

(erroneous “i like that he’s an evil villain” responses will result in being pelted with tomatoes 🍅)

[little-linda]

Ok today I read

- Javert is a cannibal (unironic)

- Javert is a slaver

- Javert is an evil, horrible person and you just like him because "Stars" slaps.

Guys. GUYS.

What

The

FUCK

Imma head out of here. I need to read about 500 stories in which the silly little babygirl he is gets lovingly topped by Valjean to cleanse my soul.

[hadleysmis]

Jean Valjean- evil!edition

[0zzysaurus]

The amis get their weed from Eponine and she gets it from Thernardier and it’s the most diabolical evil weed you’ve ever smoked. Valjean grows wholesome beautiful angelic weed