Time for some extremely funny news that feels fake but isn’t! In case you missed it:
Today on the almost-anniversary of the rebellion featured in Les Mis, the official Les Mis musical twitter account decided to celebrate by…….tweeting an enthusiastic endorsement of the Queen. This is despite the fact that the primary goal of the rebellion in Les Mis was to eliminate monarchy. Despite the fact that all the rebels in Les mis despise monarchy as an institution and consider it inherently evil/useless/tyrannical.
It feels like satire! The fact that they used an illustration of a poor starving child who in the novel symbolizes the Suffering of the French People under tyrants and tried to turn it into a piece of unironic pro-monarchy art is just? (???)
There’s something to say here about how everything political in Les Mis gets stripped away when it becomes a product for mass consumption, including the now relatively popular political belief that monarchy is a Bad form of government. Like the original novel DOES have issues with being overly middle-class/moderate at points— but there many aspects of the book that are radical and anti-authoritarian, and those aspects are always the first things to get sanded away. (See also: the way Les mis adaptations often portray police as Good Heroes fighting for Justice, which is the exact opposite of the ACAB point the book was going for )
But even putting aside all the political stuff—— the reason this fails is also because it’s Bad Branding? XD. If we’re gonna treat Les mis as a brand (ugh), then that brand is not about licking the monarchy’s boots. Les Mis’s brand is about the exact opposite of that. The kind of Jubilee joke I’d expect from a big corporate Les mis twitter account that understood its brand would be something like “Looks as if we haven’t got around to overthrowing that monarchy yet! But there’s still time!. ^_^ come see our next performance in {touring location}”. You know— a lighthearted toothless Revolution joke.
But we don’t even gET lighthearted toothless corporate Revolution jokes!
Instead we get this bafflingly sincere “I want to buy a queen plate with a picture of a starving child suffering under a tyrannical government on it.”
But YEAH my favorite thing about this tweet is the way everyone unanimously mocked it:
