#whiny victor frankenstein

[franken-loser]

There was some sort of seismic shift in my brain chemicals yesterday where i went from enjoying hydes character and design to being incredibly attracted to him this is awful

(screenshot from my insta story, its very important to note that careless whisper was also playing in the background)

[kunikidas-lost-glasses]

I don't remember him to look THAT fruity

Also shout out to this screenshot I found. Nothing straight about this man:

[nitrogenhttp]

I’m reading the one star reviews for Frankenstein on Goodreads and here are some of the highlights

(Spoiler warning ig??? It was written in 1816 though so idk catch up homeslice)

Some people can’t handle the melodrama I get it. Sometimes you need to collapse into a fever at the mildest stress. Sometimes you need to lament you life and love ones destroyed by you’re own actions. Maybe Victor is a whiny bitch maybe he’s living passionately (spoiler: he’s a whiny bitch but I love him for it). The one thing we can all agree on is we were glad when that motherfucker finally croaked and I think that’s beautiful.

What does this mean? Idk! Absolutely living for it though.

OH?!

woooosh

Look, I personally see this as one of the best parts of the novel. I’m kicking my feet and giggling every time that man collapses.

This seems to be the sentiment of most negative reviews

And finally, a list of reasons why you should absolutely read Frankenstein

[toaster-trash]

Bullying Victor Frankenstein for being mentally ill, “weak” and “whiny”: ❌

Bullying Victor Frankenstein for being a rich faggot: ✅

[insufferableprotagonistpoll]

Round 2

Propaganda why Victor Frankenstein is insufferable:

Victor Frankenstein is so pathetic not even tumblr could love him. The best parts of Frankenstein are the ones where your blessedly saved from being in his whiny, self deprecating, self centered pov. He’s so conceited that when his creation tells him directly “In revenge for killing the wife you were making for me I’m going to kill YOUR wife to see how YOU like it!”, Victor Frankenstein thinks that the creation is going to kill him and *only* him. (A decision And on top of it, he’s a shitty dad. Truly the worst.

this fucker has zero self awareness, which could maybe be fun to read about! except that 3/4 of the book consists of him constantly woe-is-me-ing about his own mistakes and how he shouldn't be responsible for any of his own actions.

He's not irredeemable, but his refusal to take accountability til it's too late is irritating

Propaganda why Caillou is insufferable:

Horrible, whiny, mean (I know they're like three but that's no excuse)

He's the absolute worst bratty child I've ever seen in a kids show, his voice is suuuper annoying.

You know and I know why, he's the poll's icon for a reason.

More propaganda

[fagsex]

'actually frankenstein was the doctor' no the hell he wasnt he was a little whiny undergrad bitch he has no degree he wasnt even there for two years before diving in on his pet project, freaking out, and then having his gaylord childhood bffl babysit him and clara barton him back to health for a year.... frankenstein was the doctor.... his name is Victor and hes a little bitch is what he is

[per1w1nkl3]

im so conflicted because like on one hand I want to slap victor frankenstein for not making a bride for his creature, on the other hand of course a whiny little bitch with bad bad anxiety (affectionate)would not think logically. he would overthink the whole thing and not stay true to his word. and fuck it all up.

[x-ladydisdain-x]

Victor Frankenstein is a whiny bitch

[twelvemonkeyswere]

I see people are doing Frankenstein Weekly and I'm glad to see more people will begin hating Victor Frankenstein as much as I do.

horrible friend, horrible brother, horrible husband, terrible scientist, irresponsible and whiny, the epitome of letting everything and everyone burn because he doesn't want to look at difficult things.

and just you wait till the end and see how he simply forgets Ernest Frankenstein.

[eolewyn1010]

Dragging Frankenstein - Chapter 15

In which Mary Shelley makes a snide commentary on the popular literature in Europe at her time. Reading is morally corrupting, yo!

“my beloved cottagers” – Stalker’s greetings!

“learned to admire their virtues” – what, like zero respect of other cultures than their own, doing good only in expectancy of a reward, and throwing away not only the own family’s life and social standing, but that of an oh-so-beloved fiancée, too? Values, amirite?

Ok, Paradise Lost may be apt reading material for the situation, but adding in Werther sure explains why the creature is just as prone to self-pitying whininess as his dad, despite not having been raised by him.

Unrelated, someone should tell the Creature that, in many regards, Plutarch was a goddamn hack.

“I thought Werter [sic] himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined” – uh, Werther was a whiny, self-absorbed emo. Can you guys stop glorifying this character type already? Even Goethe didn’t like him in the long run!

Props to Shelley though for reflecting on how literature influences someone who has zero context or additional info for what is presented to them. Like Victor with his “ancient science”, the Creature just takes this stuff at face value, and mistakes literacy craftsmanship for objective superiority.

Would have been nice to ever learn how on earth the Creature began to read in the first place. Was that part of Felix’ lessons for Safie?

…how was he carrying around Victor’s make-an-abomination journal for months and only discovered it now? How fucking convenient that he didn’t use it as fire kindler in the meantime.

The Creature describing himself as “more horrid even from the very resemblance” to humans is an interesting early description of the Uncanny Valley: The problem isn’t that he’s so very obviously not human, it’s that it’s obvious he was supposed to be human, and Victor didn’t hit the sweet spot.

“Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him” – what, like the daughter he impregnated? Come on, Paradise Lost makes it pretty obvious that guy is full of shit. Can we not set up literal Satan as a role model?

o.O Where did the new servants come from? I mean, Safie brought money and jewelry, but like, can they not use it up for fucking servants so they don’t have to use their own poor hands? Dumbasses.

“the poor that stopped at their door were never driven away” – How does this family function, financially? I’ll chalk it up to some DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR: 11

Just bc these people have no sense for scale, and it irks me.

“no Eve soothed my sorrows” – there’s a subplot tapping at my chamber door…

And there’s the clusterfuck of the Creature introducing himself to De Lacey senior. Oh, boy, this entire situation is so creepy. “Yeah, I know everything about you guys :)) Uh, I mean, these friends guys of mine. Whom I love dearly, but have never spoken to.” Fun times!

“Are you French?” …huh. Isn’t Victor Swiss/Italian? Well, anyway, they are fancy people, they probably speak three languages at once. Except German; that’s for barbarians.

Ok, seriously, what did he think how this was gonna turn out? *siiiigh* Yeah, I know, zero social graces. But going in there to hang out with the single most helpless member of the family when the rest of them are absent? Kid…

[frankenstein-assistant]

but did victor frankenstein actually have a phd?

Have you ever noticed that Victor Frankenstein seems ... well ... a bit whiny? You're not alone. Whether you're in a book club, high school class, graduate school seminar, or special collections library, Victor Frankenstein's constant complaining makes it seem like he spends "90% of the novel moping instead of doing literally anything else." [1]

My quick keyboard-shortcut search of Mary Shelley's 1818 text* yields the estimate that, within the novel, variations of the word "wretch" are used over 60 times, and variations of "miserable" or "misery" occur over 100 times. Often, these words are used to describe Victor himself, as he bemoans, and bemoans, and bemoans the misfortune of ... having accomplished exactly what he was trying to.

An excellent Tumblr post has joked that this is because, contrary to popular film depictions, "Doctor" Frankenstein "WAS AN UNDERGRAD" [capitalization retained from original] who "...had no degree at all, he was at college for like, a year." One Tumblr user comedically calls Victor a "19-year-old sin machine," and another suggests that to recontextualize how we might view Victor today, we should: "Imagine hearing about the dudebro living next to u [sic] in the dorms: 'yah Dave dropped out cuz he built a [...] person.'" [2]

Above: "Yah, Dave dropped out cuz he built a person." In the frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley's novel, 19-year-old sin machine Victor Frankenstein flees the scene of his monstrous act of creation.

Hilarious and valid as these arguments may be, which attribute Victor's moping to his age, immaturity, and hubris, Mary Shelley herself seems to have intended for Victor Frankenstein to be as overtly whiny as he is. In her introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel, she explains her inspiration behind Victor and his Creature:

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw -- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, -- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at the bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. [3]

True to her inspiration, Shelley's fiction brings this imaginary scene to life on the printed page, using intensely emotional language to craft the story's miserable tone and characterize the voice of our wretched Victor.[4] The Creature haunts Victor's every sleeping and waking thought, as he always stands at his Creator's literal and metaphorical bedside, wide eyes "following" the guilty undergrad, no matter how far he flees.

Moreover, in a future post for this blog, I’ll also connect Victor’s transition from “made-a-bad-choice” (1818 edition) to “was-always-Destined-for-Doom” (1831 edition) with Mary Shelley’s own growing fatalism due to the losses in her personal life. Anne K. Mellor presents this argument articulately in her book, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fictioon, Her Monsters -- and, if you can’t wait, you can listen to my English 20C lecture on this topic at UC Riverside here. 

Lastly, as a jokey, all-in-good-fun addition to UCR’s FrankenBlog, I have created the Twitter account @whinypantsfrank, which places images of the "whiniest" passages from Mary Shelley's original novel alongside Tweets that use social-media-style punctuation and capitalization conventions to emphasize Victor's misery. 

Click “keep reading” for sources & footnotes.

[1] This quotation comes from a viral Tumblr blog post, which can be viewed here.

*Note that this is a quick estimate rather than a thorough digital humanities project. I used an etext version of the novel available here via archive.org.

[2] See footnote 1. Some spelling and punctuation modified from original for clarity.

[3] Appendix G: Introduction. In Frankenstein: the Original 1818 Text. By Mary Shelley, edited by D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), page 357. 

[4] Yes, I am aware that Mary Shelley changed the origin story of Frankenstein several times during her life. I look forward to dedicating an entire blog post to this subject soon!

Image source: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley), 1831. Eaton Collection. From the holdings of Special Collections and University Archives, UCR Library, University of California, Riverside.

Tagging original conversation/contributors: @macklesufficient, @necro-romantic, @banal-adventures, @runwithskizzers, @dedalvs

[nyamafriend]

“oh no but what if the monster and his bride have kids” JUST DONT ADD REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS VICTOR YOU DUMBASS

[gutterson]

“Alas! why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might nearly be free…”

Mary Shelley, ‘Frankenstein’, p. 88.

[toaster-trash]

It’s always so interesting to me how so many people tend to look at protagonists’ reactions in 19th century gothic media and immediately slap a label on them as “over-dramatic” or “weak”, when in reality I don’t think we (as a society) know what we’re talking about. I think our society is collectively desensitised to concepts, and what I mean by that is that the concept of a story like Dracula or Frankenstein isn’t something that we’d ever bat an eye at because it’s been so ingrained into our very understanding or the concept of basic modern horror premises that we no longer appreciate it for what it is, and I’ve been guilty of it too. So a lot of people take the protagonists reactions to their circumstances, and paint it as melodrama or even worse, get high and mighty and claim that if THEY were in that scenario, they would NEVER do something so stupid, right?

But I need you to take a minute to actually think about the positions these characters are in. We’ve become so desensitised to these concepts, but if we were actually in those positions in real life we would probably not be able to handle them half as well as some of these characters. For example, Dracula. Sure, guy goes to stay in spooky castle, client turns out to be a vampire, pretty standard, easy to point at Jonathan Harker’s decisions and blame him. Oh Jonathan, don’t you know walking through an abandoned castle when your client tells you not to is bound to get you hurt? Don’t you know going to a remote area with villagers crossing themselves every five seconds is dangerous?

But actually think about this. You’re a solicitor, you have a fiancée back home and you need this job. You meet your client, he’s a little creepy, you feel unsafe, but you need this job. What are you going to do, turn back and tell your employer you couldn’t do it because the vibes were off? Obviously not. You suck it up. Then slowly, your world starts collapsing around you and slowly getting smaller as you find yourself trapped inside this man’s house and you slowly come to the realisation that you are being held captive in the house of a creepy old man who has access to all the rooms in the house, including your own, and can enter it at any time, in a secluded area far away from everyone, and with no hope of reaching out for help. He has the power to do anything to you, and you’re completely helpless, and does. You are going to die there and none of your loved ones will ever know what happened to you. Your abuser might even fabricate your identity or conduct a lie to ruin all memory of you forever. Then things get worse, and you realise that your abuser and captor isn’t even human. Throw in the infanticide and assault scenes, and that is a horrifying scenario, and I don’t think some people fully recognise that when they read it.

The very same with Frankenstein, oh haha, Victor gets ill often, look at him fainting every five minutes, what a whiny bitchboy, right? But Jesus Christ, again, think about this scenario that he’s in properly. My guy digs up corpses, brings them to his dorm room and stitches them together, only for him to bring said corpses to life and watch his inanimate amalgamation of dead bodies come to life in your house. Now again, imagine cutting up corpses and sewing them together. If you can’t manage that, imagine a friend of yours came to you and told you that they’d been stealing corpses, cutting them up, and sewing them together, and they now have an 8ft tall giant amalgamation or corpses in their room. Now imagine going to their house and seeing that amalgamation of corpses. Good luck not passing out and vomiting all over their bedroom floor, and extra good luck not needing extreme psychiatric care afterwards. Again, corpses. I’m willing to bet half the people here have never even seen a corpse, and this isn’t even freshly-dead-grandma-in-the-coffin, these are decomposing and rotting corpses of real human beings. Observed. And some corpses cut up. And pieced together. Into a giant corpse. Genitalia included. Intestines included. Everything else included. And then that corpse then starts killing everyone you’ve ever loved and you have the added guilt that it IS it’s own person and you’ve abandoned it.

Which of course, could lead me into a whole separate rant, on how I believe that Victor’s flaw doesn’t lie in his horror at his own actions, and his fainting and illness and whatnot, but rather at his deliberate avoidance of the consequences of those actions – (horrifying as they may have been to come to terms with, his avoidance ultimately led to the mental distress and death of tons of completely innocent people, and his avoidance, however difficult, was still very much wrong and Victor is still very much to blame for it) – as well as the mania and obsessive justification he kept using to reach that goal. Although again, it could be argued there was avoidance in that as well – Victor pasting clinical lenses over all his actions, ignoring his family and friends, which ultimately all caught up with him. It’s my reading that Victor isn’t to blame whatsoever because he’s “over dramatic” or that “whiny”, he has every right to be severely traumatised by his experiences, however much his own fault they may be, he is to blame because at every turn where he could have faced his actions and confided in a friend or likewise, he did not, and it led to the deaths of everyone he loved. Except for Ernest, who likely then had to live with the death of his entire family.

But that’s a side rant – my primary point is, I genuinely do not remotely believe that authors in the past were really any more “emotional” or “melodramatic” than we are today. The only difference is that because the premise of these plots have been so deeply engrained into our society, we do not understand how horrifyingly traumatising these situations are by nature and dismiss them out of hand. Dracula did not exist yet when Dracula was being written. Frankenstein did not exist yet when Frankenstein was being written. Don’t come looking to read old gothic literature expecting a camp B-list horror film, and then call the characters over-dramatic when they react like average actual human beings to absolutely horrific scenarios.

And what’s more with regard to general more open affection between friends in older books, no it isn’t unrealistic, we’re all just cynical assholes now. (There’s a limit, obviously. Some characters are just raging homosexuals and there’s no other explanation. “His form so divinely wrought and beaming with beauty” my ass alright now just admit you had gay sex and be done with it)

[sudbubbles101]

Stage 1. Thinking Frankenstein is the monster

Stage 2. Realising Frankenstein is the scientist

Stage 3. Understanding that no Frankenstein is the monster who ran from the consequences of his actions and let the girl his family adopted die for his (in)action

[strangestcase]

Ok but as much as he kickstarts the conflict with his massive ego (and his massive spite) (and his massive stupidity) victor frankenstein is a tragic character and if you can’t sympathize with him I’m assuming you think of his family’s deaths as a “deserved punishment“ which is 😬

like bruh yeah victor is irresponsible and whiny and can’t be assed to fix his shit but ALL HIS LOVED ONES, who have NOTHING to do with his fucking stupid science drama, ARE DYING. and victor has bipolar’s! i don’t think he can gather much energy to do anything other than wallowing in self-pity. let’s be realistic for a second here, he’s HUMAN

if You can sympathize with Adam/The Creature even after he loses himself in a spiral of mindless revenge, you can sympathize with Victor.

classic literature isn’t a game of “which character was right and which character was wrong” you fucking numskulls! both characters are sympathetic and both characters are immensely fucked up! and if victor was an irredeemable asshole that nobody likes and Adam an uwu did nothing wrong ray of sunshine THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO PLOT AT ALL.

(But also they’re both emo teens and let’s be honest, it’s not like you can’t see that coming)