Overly Devoted Archivist Uncategorized grantaire, les miserables 0 Comments

combefrere:

combefrere:

1. Do not turn Grantaire into your melancholy-anxiety-baby character

• Do not turn Grantaire into your melancholy-anxiety-baby character

Do not turn Grantaire into your melancholy-anxiety-baby character

do not turn Grantaire into your melancholy-anxiety-baby character

If I…

Ah, sorry if my post upset you. Tbh I just made this post out of pure anger because I am tired as shit of people glorifying characters with depression. It really freaks me out that people start to ‘like’ characters so much more after they’ve added depression/anxiety/self-hatred etc to them.
I see your point, but when I read fanfics where Grantaire is all weak and broken because of depression/anxiety, the first thing that comes into my head really isn’t “yes! this perfectly shows that people with depression can be strong and loving too!”. You make a great point about exploring your own troubles by using characters(I do it too!), but that’s really not very much of what I’ve seen from the whole depression Grantaire thing. What I’ve seen really, is just a weakened version of a strong character.

((about the baby thing too„ I’m not at all comparing people with depression or anxiety to babie s omg no, “melancholy-anxiety-baby” was simply an exaggerated expression to describe the glorifying of depression/anxiety etc in the R fandom))

It really freaks me out that people start to ‘like’ characters so much more after they’ve added depression/anxiety/self-hatred etc to them.

Well, me personally, I am….I am very very up for that? I think exploring mental illness (any kind) in a character, and making that character likeable is Pretty Damn Important, really.

To be honest, I think you’re doing the thing where you’re confusing ‘glorifying’ with ‘talking about openly’. So I still have to very, very strongly disagree:

Please turn Grantaire into a melancholy-anxiety-baby character. Talk about how mental health issues almost certainly feed into his very canonical substance abuse. Discuss what “Yes, I have the spleen, in addition to melancholy, with nostalgia, plus hypochondria” meant in the nineteenth century and discuss the stigma that still surrounds depression, anxiety etc now. Write about R actually being kind of a drunken dick sometimes and why he acts that way. Write about his weakest moments, especially if you’ve had them yourself, write about him crying because no-one could possibly love someone whose brain makes them so needy. (Yo.) Then write about someone loving him anyway because he’s a good person.

Drop him into the deep pool. Use him to show that you can still swim. Then do the same with other characters, characters of every gender and race and sexuality and variety. Do that, and maybe in five, ten years time I won’t be afraid to tell people I have bad anxiety and OCD (the non-hilarious kind). It’s a pretty far-off dream, but you know what they say about the future.

Overly Devoted Archivist Uncategorized grantaire, les miserables 0 Comments

Hugo, MN

It’s no big deal to see “Rue Victor Hugo” in France, but it’s something of a different story in the American Midwest.

Enter Hugo, Minnesota.  No one can agree if it was actually named for the famous author, but the town about 45 mins north of the Twin Cities has obviously decided that the literary touch makes for good publicity.  In particular, one development of very nice homes is called “Victor Gardens” and is full of streets named for characters like Valjean, Cosette…and Grantaire.

Bobcatmoran and I braved subzero temps to check it out this afternoon.

I keep reading about this place and it stands out to me that while Valjean and Cosette are obviously two of the characters the whole book pivots around, Grantaire (who appears to be the only other character to have a street named after him?) isn’t, really. In a book with 1000+ pages, he gets maybe five, six to himself . He’s only a minor character, albeit a really interesting one, when all’s said and done-

-and yet someone apparently loved him enough to NAME A STREET AFTER HIM. I dunno about you guys, but I find that really…reassuring for some reason.

Overly Devoted Archivist Uncategorized grantaire, les miserables 0 Comments

ereini0n:

So Enjolras was shot by 8 soldiers, right?
Which means that 4 soldiers thought indipendantly ‘oh, my neighbour’s shooting the leader, I’ll aim for the other guy.’

But what if each soldier thought ‘the leader’s the important one. I’ll aim for him, let my neighbour shoot the other guy’ and so they all fired at Enjolras and Grantaire would have been left standing, waiting for them to reload (a good soldier can fire 3 rounds a minute, but they’re not in any hurry), staring at his friend’s body…

WELL.