Ex-Convict of the Opera!

[tenlittlebullets]

A wee question for the flist:

A man who has been hideously wronged by society becomes a father figure to an orphaned girl twenty to forty years his junior, then falls in love with her and throws a jealous shitfit when she wants to marry some charming young man he doesn't know.

A man who has been hideously wronged by society becomes a father figure to an orphaned girl forty-five-ish years his junior, then falls in love with her and throws a jealous shitfit when she wants to marry some charming young man he doesn't know.

Why is the first one tragically romantic and the second one squicky as hell?

ETA: *facepalm* That idea is not allowed to give me plotbunnies. NO.

Comments

[nowgoesquickly.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I misunderstood. Or perhaps I'm just backward in my thinking. But I see very little romance, or much of anything good, in the relationship between Christine and Erik. He is scarily possessive of her, not to mention extremely violent. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't find the desire to own another human being to be even a little bit romantic.

The Valjean/Cosette relationship and your suggestion that he falls in love with her doesn't seem incestual so much as overprotectively dadlike. Unless you are making insinuations toward an outright sexual relationship between them, which would be a little icky if only because they've lived as father and daughter for ten years.