I Aten’t Dead!

the most unrealistic thing about harry potter

is that no teacher ever called him James by accident, or that Ron never was called “Bill-, eh Charl-, no Per-, argh!”

rereading the resurgam trilogy and I still can’t get over the fact that my undead ot3 is actually canon

@fantineweek 2018 - day three: family | friendship.

this is gonna be one part angsty canon meta, and one part angsty headcanon. because, uhhh, because i have a lot of feelings about this.

(extra long post too, whoops.)

friendship first.

okay. as much as i really, really do want fantine to have a whole bunch of friends who love and support her, and as much as i would love for favourite / dahlia / zéphine to belong to that category --

she really doesn’t have any friends at all. especially not the rest of the paris quartet.

believe me, i want favourite to be fantine’s best friend. i want dahlia to be the one who taught her which particular type of maroon made her blonde hair glow best. i want zéphine to have sat up with fantine during those restless nights when cosette was an infant and helped her with all the small important things involved with caring for a child of that age.

but while canon gives us not very much interaction between these ladies at all, it does give us just enough to say “uh-uh. the only reason these people spend any time together at all is because their boyfriends are best friends.”

from “tholomyes [sic] is so merry that he sings a spanish ditty” :

all received, to some extent, the kisses of all, with the exception of Fantine, who was hedged about with that vague resistance of hers composed of dreaminess and wildness, and who was in love. “You always have a queer look about you,” said Favourite to her.

okay, but just because hapgood has this translation, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what hugo originally wrote. (i parsed a little of this with the quartet last year here on my fantine blog.)

“tholomyès est si joyeux qu’il chante une chanson espagnole” :

toute recevaient un peu çà et là les baisers de tous, excepté Fantine, en fermée dans sa vague résistance rêveuse et farouche, et qui aimait. -- Toi, lui disait Favourite, tu as toujours l’air chose.

“avoir l’air chose” can be read as “you’re always daydreaming” or “there’s something peculiar about you” -- or any other number of ways to tell someone that they’re the odd one out.

fantine is the only one vouvoied by the entire party, except for tholomyès who of course tutoies her. we see why in this section -- because even though this is only one afternoon, and only one of the three ladies talking to her, we can reasonably extrapolate that this is how the dynamic has been between all of them for at least the past two years.

fantine is the only one who doesn’t want to play their game of exchanging kisses indiscriminately. the only one she’s in love with is tholomyès, so the only person she wants to be kissing her is tholomyès. meanwhile, the other ladies aren’t actually in love with their gentlemen: they see them as hobbies to drop when one or both parties get bored: of course they don’t care who kisses who.

the oldest, favourite, is twenty-three; the youngest, fantine, is twenty-one. that’s the same age gap between me and my sister. hugo treats this like an insurmountable distance. but it isn’t the age gap which isolates fantine from the other three ladies. it’s simply that she sees the world so differently than they do.

how could such different people be real friends?

in fact, the only person who extends a hand of friendship -- and i mean that in the sense of providing warmth and kindness in her life, out of no sense of obligation (*cough* valjean *cough*) -- is marguerite, her elderly neighbor.

from “madame victurnien’s success” :

She began to make coarse shirts for soldiers of the garrison, and earned twelve sous a day. Her daughter cost her ten. It was at this point that she began to pay the Thenardiers [sic] irregularly.

However, the old woman who lighted her candle for her when she returned at night, taught her the art of living in misery. Back of living on little, there is the living on nothing. These are the two chambers; the first is dark, the second is black.

Fantine learned how to live without fire entirely in the winter; how to give up a bird which eats a half a farthing's worth of millet every two days; how to make a coverlet of one's petticoat, and a petticoat of one's coverlet; how to save one's candle, by taking one's meals by the light of the opposite window. No one knows all that certain feeble creatures, who have grown old in privation and honesty, can get out of a sou. It ends by being a talent.

[...]

The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.

this is where the angsty headcanon about family comes in.

hugo does nothing by accident. except for his math, which he does badly on purpose, because he hates math.

in one of the earlier drafts of les misérables, he gives fantine the name of marguerite louet. he scratched this out later, of course; he gave her a diminutive instead of a proper name, to show better how much of a street urchin she was.

but he kept the name marguerite, and he gave it to the elderly spinster neighbor who helped fantine.

marguerite is a type of daisy. it is also the french version of the name margaret, which ultimately derives from the greek word margaron, meaning pearl.

y’all know where i’m heading with this.

it would be too much of a stretch to headcanon that marguerite is fantine’s mother. marguerite is probably too old to be her mother -- and she takes a grandmotherly sort of role, anyway.

more likely that marguerite is the older aunt to a niece she did not even know existed.

maybe fantine is the spit and image of marguerite’s youngest sister. maybe fantine has the same nose that their dad had, the same high forehead as her brother, the same smile as the one she sees in the mirror (the same pearls).

or maybe it’s cosette who embodies those things, and if marguerite saw that little girl, she would be struck with a living image of the past.

and she lived happily ever after, the end, tholomyès and bamatabois and everyone else can go choke.

the dress is essentially a blue version of @lesmiserablesfashions’ dress here, drawn without actually looking at the reference because i like to live dangerously.

I was looking around my old document files and found this, and thought people might like it.

Bahorel/Prouvaire pre-slash fic beneath the cut.

--

It started out very slow.

Jehan appreciated art in all its forms. The glow of a sunset, the trill of a flute, the aroma of a bakery. So it was not surprising that, one day at the Musain with friends, he happened to notice the articulation of Bahorel’s wrist and fingers.

The man had been mid-gesture, talking with Joly about – oh, probably Joly’s mistress – and Bahorel was prone to magnificent gestures with his hands, he was probably part Italian somewhere. But for some reason, one hand landed in a beam of sunlight that had snuck through the window, and the modelling of bone and muscle and skin had drawn Jehan’s eye like one of Joly’s magnets.

They had known each other long enough that, after the meeting, when Jehan went over to Bahorel and said, rather absentmindedly, “I like your wrists. And your fingers. Reminds me of Michelangelo,” Bahorel merely laughed and ruffled Jehan’s too-long hair.

And Jehan had gone home, and sung to his violets, and written a poem about a girl that he saw in the street, and that was that.

Except that it was not.

The two of them went drinking together on occasion, and would get into ferociously animated discussions about life and death, and the afterlife, and the judgment of men. And if the flash of an eye and the curve of a smile managed to leave an after-image on the insides of Jehan’s eyelids, he certainly didn’t remember it in the morning, in the aftermath of a most excellent debate, complete with Byronic skullcups and bloodred wine.

It was during another meeting at the Musain some months later, when Jehan was in the middle of expounding upon the poetic merits of pagan mythology, that he overheard a snippet of conversation.

“ – And you never quarrel!”

“That’s part of the treaty we have made. When we made our little Holy Alliance, we each assigned our own boundary that we’d never cross. The part to the north belongs to Vaud, the south to Gex. Hence our peace.”

“Peace is happiness digesting.”

Ordinary conversation on an ordinary day, but it snagged Jehan like a splinter on a stocking – tore a tiny hole, just large enough to grow, and grow it did. Weeks afterward he found himself muttering aloud: “Happiness does not come from a social contract.”

He wondered, briefly, if the nature of romantic liaisons had any bearing on Locke’s theory.

Envy is a tenacious seed, but it was not envy that took root in Jehan’s mind. Rather, it was something else, which sprang from conversation, smiles, and the model of hand and wrist, -- and became ideas, and the flash of eyes, -- and became, over the course of slow months, something that Jehan was not entirely familiar with.

He had been in love before. The girl had been his neighbor when he was a small child, and his playmate, and they chattered about the shapes of clouds and lullabies and flowers, and made mud pies, and collected crisp fall leaves. That girl had had the clearest blue eyes, and that was why Jehan loved the sky, still: it reminded him of that first love, pure and honest as only children can be.

This was something different. This was wanting.

im crying over javert getting stuck in the corner with grantaire he’s just like Why

Femslash Revolution's Tolkien Prompts Masterlist

It’s Femslash February, and femslashrevolution is hosting a prompt exchange to celebrate! Prompting is now closed, but there’s a fantastic number of Tolkien femslash prompts to fill with art, fic and whatever else you can think of! 

How to fill them:

Once prompts are posted, you are welcome to fill any of the prompts included in this event. You can fill as many or as few prompts as you like, including none at all, whether or not you submitted prompts. If you post a fill, please submit it to us and mention that it is part of the Prompt Exchange so we can share your work with our followers. For non-anonymous prompts, please also contact the original prompter directly where you can to let them know what you’ve created for them. We are happy to accept fills at any time, even after Femslash February has finished, or after a prompt has been filled by someone else.

The Silmarillion

Estë/Míriel - attempting healing in the gardens of Lórien

Tar-Míriel/Uinen - rescue out of the Fall of Númenor

Haleth/OFC - struggling to keep the balance between love and duty with one of her guardswomen

Luthien/Thuringwethil + meeting again

Galadriel/Andreth - sharing wisdom

Anairë/Eärwen - pearls

Haleth/Lalwen + sharing a tent

Thuringwethil/Varda - Thuringwethil’s life before her fall

Varda/Ilmarë - glimmer of starlight

Lúthien/Thuringwethil - how Thuringwethil came to surrender her bat-skin

Aredhel/Galadriel - on the hunt together

Aerin/an Easterling woman - unlikely companionship

Yavanna/Fimbrethil - creation

Elemmírë/Findis - making music

Ancalimë/OFC - “However this may be, the story is clear that Ancalimë did not desire love.” (for Aro Week)

Nellas/Niënor - watching over one another

Morwen/Aerin - winters in Dor-lómin

Míriel/Indis - how it all began

Aredhel/Elenwë - stargazing

Finduilas/Nienor + a trip to the beach

Eowyn/Haleth, either through time travel (forward or back) or maybe reincarnation? I just think they would be amazing together!

Miriel/Indis + homecoming

Nellas/Nienor + flowers

Aredhel/Elenwe + happy times in Valinor

The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings

Sigrid/Tauriel future-based fanwork of any kind with Sigrid being totally competent and collected and Tauriel still being a giant adorable bad-ass failboat.

Tauriel/Arwen: “The light of the Evenstar does not wax and wane. It is constant, even in the greatest darkness.” “And Wood Elves love best the light of the stars.”

Tauriel/Eowyn + hospitality

Eowyn/Lothiriel, the relationship between Rohan and Gondor is strengthened by their marriage

Arwen/Éowyn - escaping their duties on a ride through Gondor

Goldberry/Lady of the Blue Brooch - adventures in the Old Forest

Arwen/Éowyn/Lothíriel - taking comfort together while their husbands ride off to war

Eowyn/Lothiriel + court intrigue

Nimrodel/Mithrellas - finding each other again, against hope

Arwen/Eowyn + exploration

i say this every year but tumblr didn’t start doing april fools’ gimmicks until 2014. one year previous, April 1st, 2013, was a certain Incident that i am CONVINCED caused @staff to think “we have to make an april fools’ theme ourselves, because if left to their own devices, they’ll do… That”

The Three Musketeers (1993)

This website is like a suicide hotline but with text chat instead.  I would appreciate it if you guys helped spread the word.