taiey asked:
Something I know you like… Les Mis and DW?
Ooooh!
Les Miserables
Really, this one starts in 2005, almost ten years ago, when my school put on a production of Les Mis. It blew my mind in a way no other production of anything has ever blown my mind. Maybe it was the sheer power of the story, maybe because the people on stage were all mostly kids I knew (Valjean and Javert in particular were played by two ridiculously talented blokes. I sometimes wonder if either of them took a shot at professional acting), maybe because I’d never heard those amazing songs before – but I loved it. I totally loved it. And then, because Les Mis wasn’t that big a thing at that point in time and because I had so much else to occupy me, I sort of…forgot about it for years and years.
But then the movie came out, and it blew my mind all over again, and I turned to the book shortly after that. And the book is long and difficult, as everyone knows, but it’s so worth it. I’ve been trying to put into words exactly why but I think the reason why it’s so wonderful, why it works so well is because it has so many characters and yet you can tell that Hugo cared so much about them (well, with some exceptions, there are a few truly evil people in there) – everyone from Valjean to Eponine to Feuilly to Fauchelevent to Javert, Hugo didn’t care about them just as symbols (which, in a book of this kind, wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad writing decision) but as people, who do good things and bad things and everything in between.
On the same note as the above: Grantaire. Just…Grantaire, man. I don’t think any character’s ever had quite the same impact on me. Everybody’s got that one character (or more than one) who feels like an actual living, breathing and welcoming friend, who has absolutely been there through some truly shitty times, and he’s mine. And many other people’s, which somehow makes it even better.
So yeah…all that, and the fandom was absolutely amazing when I first joined it, right after the movie. It disintegrated over time, as all fandoms do. But I geniunely count January – August 2013 as one of the best periods of my entire life, and Les Mis was a pretty big part of that.