Ten Little Chances to be Free

I just finished the 1300-page monster known as The Mysteries of Paris. I've already written about how it relates to Les Mis, and I treated Fleur-de-Marie and her Victorian novel disease rather flippantly then, but the end of the novel centers around her and I ended up really liking her. TVTropes would probably have a field day with her, but she is fundamentally a subversion of a trope that's dear to a lot of people's hearts: the long-lost princess rescue fantasy.

( SPOILERY SPOILERS AHEAD )

This post got me thinking about Eponine again. Specifically: what is the difference between a Woobie and a Misery Sue?

The definition of a woobie is pretty clearly given at that link. 'Misery Sue' is a less well-documented term, but a familiar phenomenon: author thinks the definition of a Mary Sue is 'sparkly and perfect and special with no effort or trouble,' thinks that adding a traumatic past and lots of angst to her sparkly canon-invading OC will make her not a Sue, and Misery Sue is born. (I might've pulled the name out my ass, but at least one other site uses it and anyone who's been in a Mary-Sue-prone fandom will recognize the trope.) So a Misery Sue, to my mind, is an Oh So Virtuous character who's meant to come off as sympathetic and admirable solely due to the cookie-cutter angst and trauma the author has dumped upon them in spades.

It annoys me when people do this to Eponine, because it's an overly simplistic way to deal with her character. But the too-casual use of the Mary-Sue label also annoys me, because it's a way to hold female characters to a different standard than male characters, and the demonization of Mary Sues is often unnecessarily vitriolic. And I've used the phrase 'Misery Sue Eponine' to refer to a subset of Eponine fic, without really considering this, which makes me feel skeevy despite the little voice in the back of my head going "but it's an accurate description!"

So what I'm asking is, is there a male/female double standard for suffering? Woobies tend to be overwhelmingly male, Mary Sues (including Misery Sues) overwhelmingly female.

Here are the differences between the tropes, as far as I see them:

- Misery Sue encompasses solely the bad end of "fic about a character's suffering." The implication is that the author is trying to earn sympathy points by gratuitously making a character's life horrible, and that the angst and trauma are completely formulaic. It's 100% perjorative. Woobie, on the other hand, is one of those self-deprecating fandom terms that acknowledge that the woobiefication is totally for the sake of hitting emotional kinks, but admit the possibility of really good (and really enjoyable) fic that does this, alongside the usual dreck.

- The woobie trope has a significant hurt/comfort component. The audience is supposed to simultaneously want to relieve the woobie's suffering, and perversely enjoy watching because it gives them those comfort urges, or because "he suffers so beautifully," or whatever. The idea behind a Misery Sue is more that the character earns Sympathy Points that add to her eventual Isn't My Character Awesome quotient--and that this is the only reason behind the suffering.

- In other words, the tropes have different goals. The goal of Misery Sue is to make the character look good (by means of showing all the bad stuff that's been done to them, demanding the reader's pity, and flaunting the character's continuing virtue in the face of All This Trauma). The goal of a woobie is to make the reader want to comfort the character. Or, refining it even further, woobies channel suffering into catharsis, Misery Sues use suffering to establish a character trait.

Obviously there are sexist implications in the divide between a mostly-male trope that encompasses the whole gamut of fic from horrible to brilliant, and a mostly-female trope that applies exclusively to badfic. And it makes me uneasy to have referred to a subset of Eponine badfic as 'Misery Sue' without reflecting first. Is fic about Misery Sue Eponine a separate phenomenon? Or is it just the bad end of a fandom-wide tendency to cast Eponine as the woobie?

What I'm trying to say is, we've all probably seen fic where Eponine gets shat on by all creation. Thénardier beats her, various members of Patron-Minette rape her, Montparnasse does his knife practice on her, she has to sell herself to get something to eat and then Thénardier takes the money, and to top it all off, Marius doesn't love her. My question is, what's the point of the suffering in these fics? Is it for the catharsis of watching her endure, all the while wanting to scoop her up off the streets and give her a bath and a nice square meal and swear that nobody will ever hit her again? Or is it to make her look more virtuous for having endured all that, and be able to write off her flaws as merely things that were inflicted on her with no complicity on her part?

I lean towards the latter--there's very little suggestion or hope of comfort in these fics, only grim endurance. And I suspect they sprang up in response to the "Eponine was a filthy toothless stalker who wasn't right in the head (and I like her that way)" idea (itself an imperfect reaction to "Eponine was a selfless romantic heroine who totally deserved Marius" back in the days of yore). These fics are a heavy-handed defense: "Eponine might've been a filthy toothless stalker who wasn't right in the head, but it wasn't her fault."

The relationship with the musical is interesting in this case. Because these fics achieve something the musical doesn't: they focus on Eponine's life, of which Marius is just a part. Her unrequited love becomes one more trauma to add to the heap. The musical, on the other hand, constructs her entire character around Marius and the fact that Marius doesn't love her. The musical does the woobie-catharsis thing really well, presenting her angst and pain and suffering in a way that makes the audience desperately want to fix it--by having Marius end up with Eponine instead of Cosette. The show is set up to make you want this. In a way, woobie Eponine caused Misery Sue Eponine, because the idolization of Eponine and the urge to defend her come directly from the musical: it's a defense of your right to catharsis, your right to adore Eponine because she lets you purge your own demons of unrequited love/feeling cheated of the nice things everyone is supposed to have. But people get attached to her whole character, not just the cathartic aspects, so they feel the need to defend her in general, even if it makes her lose what originally made her compelling in the musical. Hence Misery Sue Eponine: you can't relate to her, you no longer desperately want to heal her trauma, because her trauma is what makes her virtuous and defends her against the "crazy unattractive stalker" accusation. But she gains something in the process, which is a life and identity outside of Marius, even if it's almost entirely defined by her role as a passive victim.

(And the role of her suffering in the book is a completely different beast that probably merits a separate post. It's not entirely cathartic, because the reader is meant to view her as somewhat Other; it's definitely not for sympathy points to be counted towards an eventual Awesome Quotient; it's partly but not entirely illustrative. And by illustrative I mean suffering like Fantine's: meant to prove a point, not about the character but about society. book!Eponine's issues are partly but not entirely like that.)

Nothing recent set this off, I'm just rather puzzled by the apparent inability of Les Mis authors to write their students doing anything but hang around in cafés in various stages of inebriation and revolutionary fervor. You'd think Paris was a dull town with nothing else to do. So at some point when I was bored over the weekend I drew up a short and by no means exhaustive list of amusements and diversions for a Parisian student of the early 19th century.

( Entertainment )

( Activities befitting a hot-headed young gentleman )

( Debauchery )

If I were asked to name five pieces of fanfiction in all of the Les Mis fandom where Enjolras played a major role and was not shockingly OOC in some way or another, I don't think I could do it.

I don't know if this is because I'm too picky or because most characterizations of him really do suck, but I suspect the latter.

(Things Enjolras is not: Insecure. A bloodthirsty fanatic. Secretly hiding a marshmallow-soft center under his marble exterior. Given to soliloquizing about his marble exterior in any way. A soft, blushing flower of a virgin. Insecure. A latter-day Saint-Just. Doubtful about the rightness of his cause. Doubtful about the efficacy of his methods. A glowering overseer who tries to prevent his friends from having any fun. Ineffective at reining them in when things do get out of hand. Ineffective at shutting Grantaire up when he gets out of hand. Intimidated by, thrown into doubt by, afraid of, or submissive to Grantaire in any way, shape, or form. Insecure. A cruel and soulless bastard. A future dictator who would have his friends executed for disagreeing with him. A fluff-headed idealist who doesn't know what he's doing. Straight. A shitty leader who's responsible for getting his friends killed. Given to angsting about whether or not he's responsible for getting his friends killed. Insecure. Cynical. Physically or emotionally frail. Stupid. A suicidal maniac. Squeamish about death, on either the giving or receiving end. A weepy uke. Insecure.)

It occurred to me in a comment thread to a post I recently made in fanficrants, that unlike the rest of the internet, the Les Mis fandom does not follow the "95% of everything is crap" rule. In fact, it's more of a bell curve--lots and lots of mediocre fic, with plenty that tends toward "not amazing but pretty good" or "I must be really damn bored to bother reading this," a limited amount of engaging and enjoyable fic and fic that makes you want to bonk the author over the head with a 1500-page hardcover... and then the outliers, the rare fic that makes you squee out loud and the (surprisingly) equally rare fic that just makes you stare at your computer screen in horror. The latter I tend to spork mercilessly on fanficrants, but the former just gets IM'd to a friend or two or maybe a nice review if I can be arsed. And the lack of attention is a shame, really, which is the reason for this post.

This is a completely random list of fics that have tickled my fancy--it's not exhaustive or anything, and I'm sure there are worthy fics that I've missed. And I'm not even going to bother posting anything from Frenchboys.net, because I know most of the people who give a damn about this post have already been over that site with a fine-tooth comb. ;) In fact, this is heavily slanted towards fanfiction.net, both because there's a higher volume of fic and because I know most of you don't bother trawling through the Pit of Voles. (It's not that bad, honestly--even if it's not that good either; see bell curve explanation above.) Feel free to comment with suggested reading, too.

• Pretty much everything by TheHighestPie, who writes gleefully nerdy stories that tend to center on Combeferre. Particularly:
  - Playing Pygmalion: In which Combeferre tries to give Eponine an education--and you just have to love a fic where they almost get arrested for flying a hot-air balloon in the Luxembourg.
  - Chrestien at Chanvrerie: A one-shot crossover with Lost Illusions, familiarity with Balzac not required.
  - The Saint-Simonian: Summary says it all, really: "Contains multiple Saint-Simons, Chenier, Charles Jeanne, Louis-Philippe, Hugo, and a 'Saint-Simonian' poet that may or may not've existed."
  - An Education: Delicious Ami banter with a nice sharp conclusion.



• By Juxtaposition by Kim Who Knows: A multi-chapter exploration of the various Amis' relationships with Enjolras, centered around Grantaire. Wonderfully written, well thought out, fanon-free, non-slash, and lamentably unfinished.



• Residuals by Petit Parapluie: "Offbeat" doesn't even begin to describe it. Javert's ghost haunts a batty widow who picks up his greatcoat, and together they fight crime do battle with ghostly revolutionaries. The author's cheerful and lunatic enthusiasm in slinging around historical details more than makes up for the occasional mild anachronism--this fic is on the good crack.



• The Seamstress of Montreuil-sur-Mer by mmebahorel: A cute--and sad--little Christmas fairy tale about Fantine. I swear there is no bias here! ;)



• Invitation by lady_iphigeneia (Part Two; Part Three): Okay, maybe there's a little bit of bias. But the sheer epicness of 13,000 words of pure Enjolras/Courfeyrac porn just cannot be disputed. Seriously, the fandom needs more porn like this.



• Idyll in the Parking Lot & Epic in the Food Court by LLQM: A modern rewrite that works because it's perfectly aware of the silliness of the premise. Or at least, it made me LOL.



• Through a Wall by LLQM: Three chance encounters between Marius and Cosette before they even thought about falling in love.



• Lymantria dispar by Margit: Only Combeferre would be more interested in sketching the moth that landed on Courfeyrac's naked body than in Courfeyrac's naked body itself. Slash, of course, and I want this Combeferre in my bed now.



• Two Hearts in Love by Mongie: A lovely series of Marius/Cosette drabbles that captures the utter adorableness of the pairing really well, with enough detours into angst and other genres to keep it from getting monotonous.



• Epic in the Alley by lesmisloony: Montparnasse jumps Enjolras in a dark alley: who will win? (Get your minds out of the gutter--it's humor, not smut.)



• I Am Rose by GizmoBunny: Cosette runs away from the Thénardiers' inn and falls in with some young Amis. Could stand to be a bit more tightly written, but it's cute and definitely gets points for originality.



• The Miserable Diaries by Framboise: Because it's a fucking classic. Do not attempt to eat or drink anything while reading this, or it will get sprayed all over your monitor from the fits of hysterical laughter.



• Reinvention by K. Telfer: All right, I'm a filthy liar and posted something from frenchboys.net, but only because it's one of my favorite slash fics in this fandom--specifically because it's almost un-slashy in the way it turns audience expectation on its head. Enjolras/Combeferre.

In the litany of classical lovers that Hugo compares Enjolras and Grantaire to, there's one that is conspicuously absent, especially given the "Apollo" reference later in the book. However. In "Enjolras and his Lieutenants" it's mentioned that Grantaire lives very close to the Café Musain--close enough to get there and back from the back room in less than five minutes. Even in the Latin Quarter there aren't too many streets that close; from what I know of where Musain was and what the Latin Quarter looked like at the time, R probably lived on either the Rue Saint-Michel, the Rue des Gres, the Rue d'Enfer, or... the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe.

iLOL.

Possibly coincidence, but given Ol' Vic's obsession with the geography of Paris (and encyclopedic knowledge thereof) and his habit of inserting Easter eggs into his books, especially ones related to Paris geography... I'm inclined to think it was deliberate.

Two links, both from metafandom. I'd expound upon them, but I already have in the comments. ;)

1. On the nature of Sues - "Mary Sue, I hold, is the phenomenon that results when an author(broadly construed) writes one or more characters in such a way that the author and that character deny other characters the right to be central to their own stories. Everything else is merely incidental." This is a way more coherent, refined, and solid version of my theory on what makes a Sue a Sue.

2. Fanfiction as a dramatic (as opposed to literary) art form: Part One | Part Two | Part Three. Lots of really neat stuff; the bits about the physicality and the almost scriptlike aspects of fanfiction were intriguing, but what really got me was the exploration of repeated tropes and plot lines being related to fanfiction as performance art. "Once a story supplements canon -- giving us something the original source did not by filling in a missing scene, getting inside a character's head, interpreting or clarifying or departing from the story as originally told -- future supplements become inevitable, and they aren't any more redundant than multiple productions of Hamlet."

Seeing Les Mis with lady_iphigeneia again, back-to-back matinee and evening on Saturday the 24th. Which should be interesting this time round, because apparently Drew's still doing matinees. (And Daphne will be gone, and Nikki will be on. Yay!) If anyone wants to meet us there for coffee and/or see one of those shows, gimme a holler.

It should also be less bank-breaking this time round, since I got limited-view third-row orch right for the matinee and the cheap seats in the back for the evening show, as opposed to $120 orch center tickets for both shows like last time. And managed to find a bus ticket for $35, yay.

I was originally horribly bored by how dry Paris Between Empires was, but now I'm further in it's become rather entertaining--for a reason the author didn't quite intend. See, in the early chapters I thought his choice of wording and quotes showed a slight, annoying bias in favor of the Restoration and against the Revolution and the Empire, but thought I was reading too far into it. But the further I go, the more I'm starting to realize Mansel assumes his audience already knows for a fact that constitutional monarchy is awesomesticks, revolutions are embarrassing, and Buonaparté ate kittens for breakfast. And then he went and dedicated an entire chapter to how much Britain pwns. In a book about France.

...yeah. The factoids are interesting, but maaaan.

Strangers, on the other hand, is all sorts of shiny. In addition to being full of interesting and useful (if annoyingly undated; I don't want to end up using 1880s slang in a story set in 1830!) information, and giving me the "god, I know that feeling" warm-and-fuzzies a lot, it dedicates some of its space to completely smacking down Proust and the notion that homosexuality didn't exist before it was named and identified as such. Not enough to be annoying, or make it primarily a historians-sniping-at-each-other polemic instead of an actual useful book, but enough to make its point. And the more I read, the more I become convinced that all the Grantaire/Enjolras subtext in the Brick is not only a valid interpretation of canon, but entirely intentional on Hugo's part. mmebahorel and I were talking about this a bit when we got coffee after seeing Into the Woods last night; how the allusions Hugo uses provide a completely different view on some of the Amis than what's said straight-out in the text. I mean, Hugo doesn't come right out and say they were boinking each other's brains out (or wanted to), but when he goes and refers in quick succession to Antinous, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaestion, Nisus and Euryalus, etc. etc... there's no way he wouldn't have known he was basically going through the checklist of code words for homoerotic subtext. (Cf. Jean Prouvaire, who looks like a total pansy unless you look up his reading material.)

Fic gets Grantaire wrong.  Almost all fic gets R wrong, even well-written fic, because fanon!R is so pervasive and no one seems to realize that's what they're using.

The killer tendency is to ascribe a deeper motivation to his cynicism than he has in canon, and often (but not as often as the first) to take away the deeper motivation for his attraction to Enjolras.

Almost all the fanfic Grantaires I've seen have become anachronistic prophets of future, more jaded generations, rambling with fatalistic certainty about how misguided all the Amis are and how stupid they are to attach themselves to a cause and how imperfect human nature is, as if R had some sort of pessimistic but solid philosophy on life.  He doesn't.  He doesn't understand anything the Amis believe in, and because he doesn't understand, he mocks--but it's shallow mockery, made up of wordplays and empty wit and spewing forth of facts, not an actual belief that they're wrong.  R doesn't believe they're wrong.  R doesn't believe anything.  He has, obviously, an immense amount of knowledge at his disposal, but no understanding whatsoever, so why would he argue that they're all misguided brats?  He can't hold up an argument except on semantics.  He picks nits; he is the master of writing a twenty-page essay with perfect style that says absolutely nothing because he can't defend a thesis; he would probably admire the nonsensical neatness of a proof that 1 = -1; his skepticism is flippant, not insightful.  So even if you, the author, think their idealism was misguided and think you understand why, don't pin that on R, because he doesn't understand shit except friendship and a full glass.

And that's why he likes Enjolras.  The Grantaire of fanon looks down on Enjolras because he thinks he knows better than E! does, but canon!R looks up at him because unlike R, he has enough understanding to believe in things and support his belief.  R doesn't get it, so he makes fun of it, but he's secretly terribly jealous of Enjolras--not Enjolras' ability to put blind faith in a cause, but his ability to understand a cause to the point where his belief isn't blind.  So again I stress, even if you think Enjolras was silly and misguided in his idealism, R is not in your position, and he is not the voice of post-Marxist disillusionment.  He's a boy who knows a lot but doesn't understand anything, poking fun at and secretly envying the people who know what they're doing.

Enjolras and Grantaire have a definite power dynamic, and in all cases that dynamic puts Grantaire beneath Enjolras.  Even R acknowledges it.  He genuinely admires Enjolras, and if there's slashy, non-platonic love in there, it stems from the admiration.  In the name of all that's good and holy, stop trashing this and substituting "Grantaire thought there were major flaws in Enjolras' philosophy, but was so infatuated with him that he followed him around like a little lost puppy."  And stop having Enjolras get cut down mid-speech by a scathing and insightful remark from Grantaire.  Grantaire doesn't do insightful.  Grantaire couldn't produce an insight if it whacked him over the head with a full bottle of absinthe.