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My mind is a rage room
I would love to see your Thoughts on the Hugolian Internal Magic System sometime:D It's something I like talking about but def. some Deep Nerding that is not an overcommon discussion!
Ah!! Thank you!! I’ve been wanting to talk about this!
But also, it’s so Big? So instead of overwhelming myself trying to cover it coherently, I’m going to get the ball rolling by scattering undeveloped ideas everywhere.
To start, my feeling is that the brick operates on something that isn’t real-world logic but a coherent system of magic logic, heavily symbolic, and with power over the events in the story. It’s not fantasy-world magic--it’s closer to magical realism, though it never quite reaches what I’d consider that.
There are a lot of magical elements in the brick. Some I want to acknowledge but have little to say about:
The animal thing. The dog-man versus lion-man, mice and cats and all that. The visual use of it in Arai’s manga was how the penny first dropped for me about the brick having magic. Many other people have more coherent thoughts about this than I do.
The fatefulness of spiders and the doom that hangs over anything connected to the numbers four or eight.
Enjolras and Grantaire in OFPD as the apotheosis of the ideal and the grotesque uniting in the sublime--I’ve read meta from you and others about this! It’s fascinating, and I feel like I only half understand it! I have nothing to add to it but it’s wonderful.
A whole lot of characters symbolize different things, and the way that functions has a magic logic to it, and Oh God This Topic Is So Big, I Can’t.
Related to the symbolism, there’s the, um--economy of casting? There’s a coherent logic behind a lot of the coincidences: If someone goes for a police officer, they’re probably going to find one--where brick logic differs from real world logic is, that policeman will always be Javert. All the misfortunes of poor and friendless young women befall Fantine. All people at the cusp between abject poverty and marginal respectability live in the Gorbeau house. I’m not sure I’d quite call this magic, but it’s related.
The place where I first really noticed the magic system myself was with the four-and-a-half characters who have power of will over when they die.
The first is the Conventionist, G——, and it’s with him we get a description of the trait I’m talking about:
Though so near to his end, he preserved all the gestures of health. In his clear glance, in his firm tone, in the robust movement of his shoulders, there was something calculated to disconcert death. Azrael, the Mohammedan angel of the sepulchre, would have turned back, and thought that he had mistaken the door. G—— seemed to be dying because he willed it so.
This isn’t a magic that can be used for arbitrary purposes--you can’t game the system with will-powered immortality. I think it’s more that the characters who have this are so in tune with the magic they become immune to petty injury until they reach the moment of their death--which will be an appropriately symbolic one.
The second of the four is the Bishop, though his death is a little different: instead of culminating in a moment of transcendent will, he’s granted Hugo’s ideal of the perfect death. (Now--I have Massive issues with what Hugo thinks the perfect death is. Spoilers: you’re blind, and beloved woman is taking care of you. It’s gross, sexist, ableist bullshit with wild disregard for boundaries, and Hugo is being The Worst. But anyway.)
In the text it’s the ideal death, and Myriel is granted it. This feels to me like not an exception to the system but its culmination--the other four are granted sublime and transcendent suffering, and Myriel was granted something past that: transcendence without the suffering.
Following the Bishop and the Conventionist are their direct successors, slightly more tarnished, but only slightly: Jean Valjean and Enjolras.
Like the Conventionist, neither can be killed until they choose to die. Until that time, bullets don’t touch them. Both deaths are sublime and transcendent, but Enjolras seems to come closer to perfection--there’s something strangely self-defeating in Valjean that doesn’t exist for the other three. Nevertheless, both of them clearly have near-superhuman power of will over their deaths.
Discussions of what Enjolras would have done if he’d survived after condemning himself for Le Cabuc feel slightly misaimed to me because of this--my feeling is that once he condemned himself, there was no other ending. He belonged to the magic, and he had willed it so--he Knew.
(And... okay, side note, I personally am writing an AU where he lived. But I had to fracture some of the magic system to do it. It felt right to me that in a story about Combeferre the magic would be fractured--I don’t know, I feel like that’s a thing.)
Aside from those four, many characters have different magic at different times. Eponine gains a preternatural ability to get things done, Gavroche is made of magic and Paris, there’s a lot of magic in Cosette, and so on. The Amis are also magic, and a few of them seem remarkably able to perceive it--Combeferre understood Valjean at a glance and described Fantine exactly. (Side note: my favorite headcanon about Combeferre is that he has a nearly unparalleled ability to perceive the magic system but is too at odds with himself to use it.)
But I feel like there’s a character with a half-realized version of the transcendent will like the other four above, and it’s Javert.
There’s something really interesting going on with Javert and magic.
Like Valjean and Enjolras, he’s immune to bullets, (”You’ll misfire”/The pistol misfired.) And Valjean almost gave to Javert the transformation Myriel had granted him, but something went wrong. Instead of becoming the fifth of these supernormal characters, Javert reaches half a revelation and backs away. He wills his own death, but prosaically and with despair, in a bastardized version of what the others achieve.
I can’t prove this, but I put real significance in that moment when Javert’s tied-up body makes a cross with Mabeuf’s body laid out, and instead of bearing his suffering he asks Enjolras to re-tie him lying down. Javert does a LOT of things wrong morally, but magically and symbolically that might be where he got off the path of the Absolute. (Does it matter symbolically that there end up being four of them (a fateful number) rather than five? Does the feeling of transcendence in Enjolras’s death and incompleteness in Valjean’s have anything to do with the fact that Enjolras convinced Grantaire, but Valjean did not convince Javert? ...I’m not convinced of any of that, but it occurs to me.)
--
And the barricade.
The barricade is made of magic and fate and the Absolute. It magically draws everyone to it and intensifies the magic potential in anyone near it. Enjolras and Jean Valjean become godlike, and everyone else becomes more transcendent as they get nearer.
I swear I can hear the first sparks of the magic of the barricade forming in Grantaire’s dialogue in the Corinth. He’s in the middle of a misogynistic and racist harangue and then he bursts out with:
“And it appears that they are going to fight, all these idiots, to get their heads broken, to massacre one another, in midsummer, in the month of June, when they might go off with some creature under their arm, to scent in the fields the huge cup of tea of the new mown hay!”
(Wilbour. Hapgood massacres this line.)
...then he goes back to rambling, until he wanders into an entirely perceptive (if wryly mocking) description of Marius’s love for Cosette and his own for Enjolras: “They must make a queer pair of lovers. I know just what it is like. Ecstasies in which they forget to kiss. Pure on earth, but joined in heaven. They are souls possessed of senses. They lie among the stars.”
Which, for once, is exactly correct.
And I think these sparks happen because the barricade is beginning, and the barricade is magic, and it’s what finally pulls from Grantaire what he was capable of.
There is SO MUCH MORE I’m sure, but this post is becoming novel-length, so I’ll stop for now. Anyone who wants, please argue or expand!
Sheith Westworld Whump?
Posted Chapter 7 of “If I die before I wake”... promise I never meant to hurt these boys like this! https://archiveofourown.org/works/21041831/
🌅🌵🐂🏜️
ORV gives you a main character who is so detached and suicidal and never gets better
But more importantly it gives you all the people who would tear apart reality itself for one more chance to be with him
As someone who has struggled with depersonalisation and derealization and suicidal ideation for pretty much my entire life this book, even when deeply painful, is the most uplifting and convincing DO NOT KILL YOURSELF treatise I have ever read
Because it's easy to convince yourself that no one will miss you
That no one actually cares about you, because how could they? You're a monster
That you only have worth in what you can give
But then you see Kim Dokja who believes about himself all the worst things you have thought about yourself and who has arguably done worst things then you could ever do...and you see how he doesn't see the love and care and devotion that is right in front of his face
You are begging him to stop and see it
To recognise that he doesn't have to do everything alone
That he is loved so so deeply
And maybe, just maybe you can get yourself to open your eyes. Or just believe that maybe you're just as blind as Kim Dokja.
I know some people will see this book as despairing or that the message is that you can never actually cross that divide. But for me it's a push to say you can cross it.
That there are people in this world waiting for you to extend your hand and they will hold you close and never let you go
It's hope in the despair
At least for me
Taking a pause from my instagram until I figure out how to navigate the app without being constantly triggered by the suggested posts
Context
Based on Blood Communion.
For a year and four months I worked as an in home caregiver for people with severe disabilities. There were parts of my job I liked a lot and parts that were very frustrating, but overall it was unsustainable because I had to commute for an hour to the city and then during the day I'd have to go from one home to another. I was not paid for that time. So I was earning a part time salary but I was gone from home 60+ hours a week. I was utterly exhausted.
I found a job just 3km away from home, working at a long term care facility for elderly people who are still fairly autonomous. Reader, it was a shitshow. This has been independently verified; the government agency that evaluates these places failed the facility.
Anyway, I was going to hang in there because they had promised to put me through a nursing assistant certification. At the end of my 30 trial period they fired me. Mind you they never trained me for any part of the job. When I asked questions I got answers ranging from sarcastic to nasty. And no one ever gave me any feedback. So yeah I'm sure I fcked things up but I'm also not a mind-reader and a heads up would have helped. Anyway. Because I quit the previous job and worked only thirty days I'm ineligible for unemployment aid. You have to have worked at least 91 days after quitting a job.
It's been two weeks. I have lost track of how many jobs I have applied for. I have three kids. One has a birthday in November, then there's Christmas, and then another has a birthday in January. I'm stressing so hard. I had a job interview today at a long term care facility for dependent elderly people but it's in the hour-away city and the bus schedule doesn't fit with their shifts. The managing nurse is going to see if she can make it work when she does the schedules for November and December over the weekend. I find out on Monday.
I did not get the long term care facility job because of the limitations of my bus schedule.
I have a job interview at a local restaurant to do cleaning and dishwashing on Friday morning. On the one hand, I really need it. Otoh, this gets me no closer to my goal of getting into a certification program to become a nursing assistant, nor does it help with my goal of moving to the hour away city. All that could wait until after January, but the contract the restaurant is offering is indefinite. This means that unless they fire me, I can't quit and still be eligible for unemployment. Which means it's likely that taking the restaurant job closes doors for me for who knows how long.
I don't have a real choice though. None of the jobs I'm qualified for in the hour away city are going to be good with my bus schedule unless I do part time and part time isn't going to be enough.
For a year and four months I worked as an in home caregiver for people with severe disabilities. There were parts of my job I liked a lot and parts that were very frustrating, but overall it was unsustainable because I had to commute for an hour to the city and then during the day I'd have to go from one home to another. I was not paid for that time. So I was earning a part time salary but I was gone from home 60+ hours a week. I was utterly exhausted.
I found a job just 3km away from home, working at a long term care facility for elderly people who are still fairly autonomous. Reader, it was a shitshow. This has been independently verified; the government agency that evaluates these places failed the facility.
Anyway, I was going to hang in there because they had promised to put me through a nursing assistant certification. At the end of my 30 trial period they fired me. Mind you they never trained me for any part of the job. When I asked questions I got answers ranging from sarcastic to nasty. And no one ever gave me any feedback. So yeah I'm sure I fcked things up but I'm also not a mind-reader and a heads up would have helped. Anyway. Because I quit the previous job and worked only thirty days I'm ineligible for unemployment aid. You have to have worked at least 91 days after quitting a job.
It's been two weeks. I have lost track of how many jobs I have applied for. I have three kids. One has a birthday in November, then there's Christmas, and then another has a birthday in January. I'm stressing so hard. I had a job interview today at a long term care facility for dependent elderly people but it's in the hour-away city and the bus schedule doesn't fit with their shifts. The managing nurse is going to see if she can make it work when she does the schedules for November and December over the weekend. I find out on Monday.