Idk How Many Non Theater Nerds Will Understand How Huge This Is But Holy Fuck

eponine thenardier they could never make me hate you

you pick a les mis cast recording at 16 and that’s the one you’re stuck with for the rest of your life i fear

today i am thinking about the eight bullets that kill enjolras, and how i always see people saying they represent his eight friends to die at the barricade, but when i first read his death what came to my mind was the eight men to escape the barricade alive: valjean, marius, javert, and the five men who are given the national guard uniforms. i think of those eight bullets being meant for those eight men, and enjolras taking them all. he did not change the world in the way he meant, but he changed the world for eight men, and that has to be enough.

Needed to practice backgrounds so I just put him there awsell 🤷‍♀️

cosette and her glock

About 10 years ago I was working for a gaming company doing creature design. After work, I would go home and dissect animals in my garage. I borrowed a tiger carcass from a local taxidermist. I wanted to understand how the jaw muscles worked, so I stop motion animated it.

The muscle on the back of the head (Temporalis) bulges out when the jaw is closed. But when the is jaw is open, it depresses in like the surface of a trampoline. But not uniformly, in a Y shaped pattern.

I ended up getting evicted for stop motion animating tiger parts in my garage…..but it was worth it. I still have hard drives full of animal carcasses reference animations today. Fun Times.

Enjolras sketches.

Hehe mini enjolras

I went to see Les Mis a few days ago! Here are my notes:

- Killian Donelly's Valjean, I think, fits so perfectly with Bradley Jaden's Javert. Killian is a little more harsh, a little more desperate to atone for his sins. He trembles when he holds those silver candlesticks, you could hear his desperate breaths. No matter how soft or how gentle he’s become, he is still so, so anxious and paranoid.

- But y know what? There was freedom when he saved Javert from the barricades. There was freedom when he grounds himself in his love for Cosette. There was freedom when he shows mercy and forgiveness. At the face of love and mercy, he is free and I FUCKING WENT INSANE

- Bardley Jaden’s Javert's transformation from start to finish is terrifying and I'll say it again. He was not so violent at first. He was composed, strong-willed. He held his nose high and looked down at everyone. He pitied Fantine and smiled at her, he looks to the audience with gentle eyes asking to be justified, asking for some kind of sympathy as if he was a saviour taking action so no one else should. It is such a contrast to Valjean's anxious nature.

- but Javert is capable of fear. I have never thought I would see a Javert so terrified of somehow being misunderstood, of being proven wrong for his ideals and principles. Normally, Javert is angry with his sights only on Valjean, but Bradley makes this character so fearful AND IT IS SCRUMPTIOUS. Almost near the end he's afraid of even Valjean's touch. He doesn't look at the audience, he looks up at the heavens instead.

“The man remained silent for a moment, then said abruptly, ‘So you’ve no mother?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied the child.

Before the man had time to respond she added, ‘I don’t think so. Other people do. But I don’t.’

And after a pause she went on, ‘I think I never had one.’”

(LM 2.3.7)

everything about this exchange kills me. cosette’s simple acceptance of “I don’t” as if her existence as a motherless child is just the way it is. not a mystery, not a tragedy—she just inherently exists outside of other children’s reality.

it’s one small moment, but it encapsulates the age-old attitude that the status-quo will never change, that systems of oppression are simply a natural and unavoidable reality. and that perception squashes any potential to imagine a different way of life.

(only for valjean to show up at the inn all like “actually cosette, you are NOT inherently alone and unloveable, you are NOT destined to an existence of servitude and poverty, there IS another way of life for you and we’re going to go find it together”)