Hugo, this is a narrative, not an essay on linguistics, waterloo, or how a bishop spends his money.
Victor Hugo would like to argue the point in a quick 1500 page rebuttal.
victor hugo
My favorite thing about Victor Hugo is that the Notre Dame Cathedral was a huge eyesore on the verge of collapsing and was planned to be demolished but Victor Hugo was like “hey :( I like that building” and wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame to save it. and it worked
In the book he described the cathedral in the state it was in but also in comparison to what it looked like in the 15th century before it got all fucked up in the French Revolution. His book got translated into a fuck ton of languages and was distributed all around Europe. Tourists who were fans of him would go to see it while in Paris and were appalled to see just how bad of shape it was in and it started to become stain on paris’ reputation.
So finally the king funded the Hella expensive restoration which I imagine was one really fucking gnarly project, the structure it’s self being the tip of the ice burg because of how many religious artifacts and statutes and junk that had been ruined.
So thanks Vicky that’s one hell of a beautiful tower.
okay I saw someone in my notes being sad that they never hear any positive Victor Hugo stories
(honestly most Victor Hugo stories are just bizarre, like how do you even rank the seance thing or the bat present, like at a certain point there just has to be a classification off the good/bad beam that’s just “Romantic” so everyone can get on with life , but I digress)Anyway I was reading Alexandre Dumas’ memoirs, and apparently early in his career, after a lag caused by multiple censor bans and refusals for all the usual show biz profit reaons, he had put on a play for a sort of Society Preview to get assessed to see if it would keep going? As you do (oh gad French theater in the 20s-30s was so big and so complicated please don’t ask me to explain it all right here but anyway)
and it was a success! But he had to do multiple edits to get permission to make it an ongoing play! Which, okay, he could do that! Except he also had to have an opening night party and entertain the Right People to get this play to be successul! Like, really, had to. So he wines and dines and schmoozes the necessary schmoozing all night and THEN has to go and look at his play and try to be creative and make necessary edits at Why O’Clock in the early morning–
and all the edits were already done. Done really well, by someone really good who totally knew the sort of thing Dumas would have written himself. And it was Why O’Clock in the morning, so he didn’t question the Magic Editing Elves too closely, he was just grateful and went to bed.
But Dumas found out later from a mutual friend who’d been in on it that Hugo and another friend had snuck into the writing studio while the party was going on and done the edits without telling anyone
because they were buddies and buddies do that
even in the memoirs years later Dumas is like YES HIGH FIVE THANK YOU FOR SAVING MY BACON PAL
so there you go, Victor Hugo, Study Buddy and Stealth Assistant Editor FOR FRIENDSHIP.
Someone please tell my id that it doesn’t need me to write a thousand-page parody of Victor Hugo’s Star Wars, no matter how “awesome” or “fun” it may sound at first
oh my god please, please do
La Guerre des étoiles
UN ESPOIR NOUVEL
Book the First: A Solitary Man
I. Ben Kenobi
In Year 20 of the Empire (Year 10,191 since the forming of the Coruscant Convention), Ben Kenobi was a hermit living beyond the Dune Sea. He was an old man of about fifty-nine years of age; he had occupied his tiny desert hovel since Year 0.
Although it has little direct impact on the story we are about to relate, it nevertheless behooves the author to reveal, if only for the sake of completeness and exactness, the various rumors that circulated the person of “Old Ben” Kenobi. True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do. Very little was known about Ben Kenobi, in honest truth; it was widely known that he was an offworlder, and a recent newcomer to the barrel soil of Tatooine; it was less-widely known, though no secret, for Kenobi himself would say as much to those who asked, that he was from the planet Stewjon, in the Daly System. How he had come to reside on Tatooine was the source of much speculation.
Once one entered the realm of rumor, however, the accounts varied widely: he was a wizard, some said, or a crazy old man parched by the lack of company. He was alternately a scholar, a monk, a widower, or a scarred veteran of the Clone Wars, come to find what peace was left to him; the fruit-seller at the edge of Mos Eisley, where he came once a month to replenish his stores, claimed he was the last Jedi Knight, fled to the Outer Rim to hide from the depredations of the Empire. In spite of this wide-ranging gossip, or perhaps because of it, Ben Kenobi cut a dashing, mysterious figure to the starved minds of the out-flung desert settlements in which his name was known. He was well-formed, and although shorter than human standard, was still taller than many of the specimens to be found in Tatooine’s slums. He was well-spoken, conscientious, graceful, and learned; he spoke of distant worlds with the familiarity of a spacer and the precision of a Hutt.
as soon as i saw “Although it has little direct impact on the story we are about to relate” i knew this was a solid parody
more of this sort of thing
omg, victor hugo WOULD think well of obi-wan kenobi
@sarah531!!!
this is excellent write the whole thing immediately
so like i know you have parody books like william shakespeare’s star wars but omfg i need victor hugo’s star wars like !!!!!!
i need 60 pages establishing obi-wan kenobi then he disappears for 100 pages while the homestead is established with a solid ten pages about uncle owen. and then when “ben” shows up and the author pretends the audience doesn’t know it’s obi-wan for like 46 pages while also discussing the tuskans travelling habits in depth.
IN FACT I WANT A WHOLE 60 PAGES “BOOK” ON TUSKANS COMPLETE WITH A CHAPTER ABOUT THEIR LANGUAGE
and like i fucking need “volume two: luke, book the second: the space craft falcon, chapter xi: a man whose nature may or may not be revealed in his last name of solo”
and like i need “vader derailed” with like 10 fucking pages detailing vader’s inner landscape and upheaval but only like one sentence about him actually tossing sidious into the abyss and the abyss itself gets a two paragraph description
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