Hmm. I’ll push my demiromantic Grantaire agenda, where he definitely takes note of how physically attractive people are, but he has absolutely zero desire of dating them because the thought simply makes him cringe.
And then Enjolras comes along, being the fucking gorgeous man he is but also taking the time to befriend both Grantaire and his cat, making poor, unwitting R fall head over heels for him. Listening to Enjolras’s stupid yet admittedly funny jokes and watching him laugh at Grantaire’s is everything he has ever dreamed of, and he doesn’t want to ruin their friendship, but he takes his chance.
Their dates mostly consist of cuddling on the couch and sharing a blanket while watching shitty period dramas and occasionally making out before Marshmallow interrupts them with a paw to Enjolras’s face. And before Enjolras can kiss Grantaire again, Grantaire starts rambling about the awful costume choices and how they’re not even accurate. Most importantly, Enjolras hangs onto every word like they’re meaningful to him.
Part of the reason I have a complicated emotional relationship with Javert is because— Javert is BAD. He is a BAD person
But adaptations often don’t understandwhyhe’s bad, and make him bad for the wrong reasons.
In the book, Javert is bad because he’s a cop. He is the Best Cop It is Possible to Be, he’s honest and completely obedient to the law, and he’s TERRIBLE, because you can’t be “good” when you’re enforcing a system that is inherently cruel.
But like… in Les Mis 1998 Javert is portrayed as being an unusually evil person who just has a weird obsession with Valjean, unlike other cops, who are Good. Les Mis 1998 even adds a Good Cop side character who lets Valjean go free in Montreuil-sur-Mer, while joking with Valjean about how Javert is unusually evil and none of the other cops like him.
???????
And as I’ve ranted about a lot, BBC Les Mis Javert’s desire to enforce the law is portrayed as a goodhonorable quality, and there’s an entire precinct of “good cop” side characters who help him…..while BBC Javert’s actual “moral failing” is what Andrew Davies calls his “twisted love” for Valjean.
and I’m just like…eh? Javert is bad, yes!! But that’s noT WHY he’s bad. He’s not bad because he’s gay, he’s bad because he’s a cop. He’s not bad because he’s an usually evil cop, he’s actually an unusually “good” cop— and being a “good cop” is why he’s bad!
Anyway….my problem with these adaptations isn’t that they make Javert a bad person, it’s that they completely misunderstand why he’s a bad person. They turn a critique of the police as a whole into “one guy was weirdly mean, and then he died and everything was fine”
One of the things that makes the 98 Javert situation really stand out to me is that …yeah, sure, other cops don’t like Javert in book!canon *because he’s too good a cop*, he’s not corrupt, he doesn’t take bribes or work closely with criminals and he is not comfortable or chill with other cops who do that! They specifically distrust him and shut him out of some things because he’s Too Honest! Flipping it around so that he’s the exceptional Bad Guy is such a wild misreading but it keeps happening! whyyyy
Because society is afraid to say that most cops around the world enforce a system that was built to keep poor people oppressed and the rich and affluent in power. Victor Hugo literally said this about Les Mis, quote for quote:
“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age — the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night — are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless”
Society continues to fear admitting to that, so of course Javert is painted as a bad apple.
pizza wasn’t invented until the late 19th century so that means everyone in les mis died before they could try their first pizza and that’s why les mis is such an upsetting story
![nollimet:The Death of Jean Valjean | The Birth of Monsieur Madeleine [Les Misérables]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/54e92d4ba5a8dc00e1a07fcd5bda80de/c9606ed8c96143a1-b0/s1280x1920/44c5a19729e9e22364495cd979a6da4000ce4982.png "nollimet:The Death of Jean Valjean | The Birth of Monsieur Madeleine [Les Misérables]")
