Particolored-arts - It's A Work In Progress

@fantineweek 2018 - day one: youth | childhood.

going off the hapgood translation available online here.

She was born at M. sur M. Of what parents? Who can say? She had never known father or mother. She was called Fantine. Why Fantine? She had never borne any other name. At the epoch of her birth the Directory still existed. She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal name; the Church no longer existed. She bore the name which pleased the first random passer-by, who had encountered her, when a very small child, running bare-legged in the street. She received the name as she received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained. She was called little Fantine. No one knew more than that. This human creature had entered life in just this way. At the age of ten, Fantine quitted the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood. At fifteen she came to Paris “to seek her fortune.”

this is the only paragraph we have that describes anything of her youth. as far as hugo is concerned, her story begins in 1817, when she is 21 years old and two years a mother.

fantine, as in (en)fantine - childlike. the obvious connotation there is innocence.

it is pretty much implied that fantine grows up on the street much the same way that gavroche and the mômes did. and yet hugo spends so much time after this telling us how much she is naively in love with tholomyès; how young she is, how sweet this first love is, even if tholomyès does not requite it.

that naïveté might be solely attached to her romantic inclinations, though, i think.

fantine survives a childhood in the gutter. yet hugo only devotes two sentences (two! out of this enormous book, only two!) to her rise from gamine to grisette.

she is clever enough to realize that she will not be able to get anywhere in life if she stays where she is. hugo says she quits montreuil-sur-mer at the age of ten. ten years old. what on earth was i doing at the age of ten? pretending to be a gargoyle at recess? reading books about talking owls? fantine volunteered to work at a farm; she worked there for five years; and when she wanted more out of life, at the age of fifteen (only two years younger than cosette in 1832!) she walks to paris.

four years later she becomes a mother.

when we first see fantine in “double quartette” and “four and four”, she is young; she is quiet, prone to melancholy daydreaming; she is in love with tholomyès.

(side note: digging through “four and four” for quotes, i found this:

Listolier and Fameuil, who were engaged in discussing their professors, explained to Fantine the difference that existed between M. Delvincourt and M. Blondeau.

blondeau, that old rat! eleven years from now we’ll be hearing your funeral oration courtesy of bossuet! it’s little nuggets like these that keep me in love with this book, dammit.)

fantine wears fashionable if modest clothes, and hugo takes great care to describe not only the curve of her throat and the dimple between her shoulder (uh ... thanks, buddy) but the type of fabric that she wears, the particular color of the muslin, et cetera. fantine is a pieceworker at this point -- she clearly knows what she is doing, even if she is less coquettish about it than the other girls in the quartet. this gives us an inkling of what she spent her time doing from the age of fifteen onward. though, really, this is only a different venue for what she had been doing ever since she was ten.

she spent her time climbing up the ladder. she found a new skill, and she learned it, and she made herself useful. i don’t call that particularly naive.

she got out of the gutter, and the horrors that this entails. she made herself a comfortable life away from the constraints of what she was born into.

contrast this with the stories of valjean and javert:

valjean did not start in the gutter. he was forced into prison, and he was forced into the abyss that is being an ex-convict. only the grace of m. myriel allowed him to climb out of that pit -- not just his kindness, but his silver. ( “i have bought your soul for God.” )

javert started in the gutter, but unlike fantine -- let’s be honest here -- given the social and historical context in which hugo was writing, the terms with which he describes javert can easily be interpreted as javert being part romani -- javert does not have the same options to rise from his horrible circumstances. he has no miraculous donor to give him money. and he is not a blonde white girl.

so fantine and valjean get out. there is a catch; of course there is.

it is valjean’s history which is the pitfall waiting for him. as long as someone knows who he is, and will take advantage of it, he will always have the specter of the bagne lurking over him.

and fantine’s fate? well, by the time we meet her, as young as she still is (21! by God, she’s only twenty-one years old!), the trap has already been baited and set for her, and she’s already been caught in it. tholomyès has made her the mother of his child, but he has refused to make her his wife.

i don’t believe that fantine is so innocent she cannot comprehend it is only tholomyès’ whim which keeps her, an unmarried mother, out of the yawning abyss. i can’t believe it. she must have seen enough of life, both in paris and in m-sur-m before that, to know how society devours unmarried mothers.

i can, however, believe that it is her innocent love which blinds her to the fact that he is willing to condemn her to such despair.

critique day’s over which means I can fiNALLY POST THESE. story, art, and font are all mine ✨

the Mighty Arising eyy *fingerguns*

as it turns out my opinions about melkor the morgoth upon arda (tm) have changed significantly, oh well

salt about les mis bbc under the cut.

okay. i just gotta say, regarding the gifset where lily collins and david oyewolo are talking about the part where he as javert throws her as fantine to the ground. she lands badly, but she winces and continues acting in character, and the camera cuts away from him which is good because he’s horrified that he actually did throw her to the ground.

here’s the thing.

that was a little accident, right? that was an organic scene that happened between two actors.

pinches bridge of nose.

sighs.

theater is organic, because it is new every night. actors get sick and react differently to their understudies than the leads; the audience is particularly receptive or not receptive; maybe there’s a tech fail, or someone forgets to come onstage at the right cue; maybe someone accidentally falls into a trash can and ad libs the rest of a soliloquy from that new vantage point. the actors’ choices matter, but it is a live thing, so each person’s choices interact with things outside their control every single time. theater lives. it breathes. so do live concerts for orchestra, for singers, for comedians.

but nothing in film is organic, just like nothing in writing is organic.

these are created things, set in amber, preserved. these are not alive the same way that theater or concerts are.

there is a choice behind every movement. every element -- the lighting, the costumes, the sound, down to the last flicker of film and the last byte of noise, everything you experience in a film is something that someone decided specifically to do. it is a curated experience. it is inorganic. it is manufactured.

does that mean film is worse than theater? duh, no it doesn’t. but what it does mean is that you look at it for what it is: a series of choices carefully selected.

the accident of david throwing lily to the ground -- which, as we see in the gifset, he very clearly did not mean to do! -- existed organically.

but they had been doing a couple takes of it, as far as i can glean from the gifset. so there were multiple takes to choose from, including that one.

the director chose that one specifically.

this action happened organically, but it does not exist in the bbc miniseries organically, because -- i cannot repeat it enough -- the miniseries is a filmed entity, a manufactured thing, a made thing which consists solely of decisions within the creators’ control.

when i scream “WHY DID THIS HAPPEN” at my computer (or in the tags of a gifset), i am not screaming it at the actors. i am screaming at the director, who chose for this organic moment caught on camera to be part of the manufactured scene that happens in the tv show.

Fictober Event,  The prompts for 2020

Here is the list for October this year. Write something short (or long) and tag it with #fictober20 in the first five tags. Let’s see your creativity!

“no, come back!”

“that’s the easy part”

“you did this?”

“that didn’t stop you before”

“unacceptable, try again”

“that was impressive”

“yes I did, what about it?”

“I’m not doing that again”

“will you look at this?”

“all I ever wanted”

“I told you so”

“watch me”

“I missed this”

“you better leave now”

“not interested, thank you”

“I never wanted anything else”

“give me a minute or an hour”

“you don’t see it?”

“I can’t do this anymore”

“did I ask?”

“this, this makes it all worth it”

“and neither should you”

“do we have to?”

“are you kidding me?”

“sometimes you can even see”

“how about you trust me for once?”

“give me that”

“do I have to do everything here?”

“back up!”

“just say it”

“I trust you”

This event is open to all fanfiction and original fiction.

Start October the First. You do not have to do the prompts in order. Tag your posts with #fictober20. Please state if your entry is original fiction or fanfiction and what fandom at the top. State common warnings and triggers at the top and tag accordingly. I reserve the right to not reblog fics that I find inappropriate. I will reblog things here on @fictober-event, follow this blog to see all the entries.

Go forth and write!

Photo by Vladas Kalnys on Unsplash

athos + milady during the venice heist - the three musketeers (2011) dir. paul w.s. anderson.

I.. wanted to draw Bahorel wearing that vest [x] and I don’t know what happened.

remind me again why i decided to get invested in game of thrones when there are fcking ice zombies and zombies are one of my least favorite horror tropes

Hakuna Matata

"Look, all I'm saying is that you need to loosen up a little, Inspector," said Joly, tugging at the man's sleeve. "Stop worrying about criminals for one minute."

Javert gave him a tired glare.

"You need to relax, hein? All this stress is going to do is wear you out, so that you'll be too exhausted to actually catch them. And who knows, you might actually like the opera. Give you something to hum along to when you're on a stakeout. I know it helps me when I'm studying for exams."

"No."

"Please?" He tugged harder. "Come on. No worries. Your paperwork will still be there when you get back."

The grizzled wolf let out a long-suffering growl before trotting after the puppy, who, upon discovering he'd followed, circled back to yip happily and leap up and paw at his ears.

"You'll have fun, I promise!"

Gavroche had taken to hanging around the Friends of the ABC during their meetings, getting underfoot and being helpful or a nuisance or both, arguing with Enjolras, admiring Bahorel, delivering messages and cockades, being a snarky brat.

And falling asleep on Joly.

It was something that had happened often enough that the others joked about Joly being an especially good pillow, to which Bossuet would reply that indeed he was, to which Joly would reply with a whack of the arm and a blush.