?!

You could give Cosette so much interiorityy, you could have parallels between the two of them and the horrible abuse of their childhood, but Marius has all his friends and Cosette is sort of lonely and recluse by virtue of The Mystery of Her Life; Cosette misses a mother she hardly remembers and Marius is still mourning the father he didn't get to know.

And while Marius and les amis plot focus on the bigger misery in France, about the politics, Cosette witnesses again and again the more "mondane" sort of misery in the streets of Paris.

and god, EPONINE.

(tw rape & sexual assault)

so in the FIRST EPISODE of the show, jenny (14 at the time) almost gets raped. she only isn't because her brother intervenes, physically pulls the guy off her, and punches him. then, instead of getting any support from the people around her, jenny spends the subsequent 3 years getting socially shunned and then bullied by her classmates so badly it falls into physical abuse (they LIGHT HER HAIR ON FIRE), getting emotionally neglected by her dad so badly she voluntarily becomes homeless and files for emancipation, and having to temporarily LIVE with the guy who tried to rape her when her dad marries his stepmom. as a result, she spirals further and further into obvious ptsd, and at the end of season 3 she loses her virginity to the guy who tried to rape her in a VERY dubious and pretty coercive way. she then is "banished" from new york by that guy's girlfriend and leaves the show, returning only to try to break up her dad and that guy's stepmom so that she can come back to new york, and then when that fails returning after only in cameos.

her only sins are:

being exactly as mean, ambitious, and backstabbing as the rest of the main characters, except because she wasn't rich the show framed it as "worse" and then none of the fans challenged that because she's a teenage girl,

acting and looking less like an adult than the other characters both because she was younger than the other characters and because her actress was much younger than the other actors, which emphasized the fact that she was a teenage girl,

being traumatized in an glamorous and messy way, which the fans weren't willing to tolerate because she's a teenage girl,

and being a teenage girl.

it's fucking 2026. we should be over hating teenage girls for the crime of being teenage girls by now.

jenny humphrey deserved better.