lover of monstrous others and their spunky beaus

Dane 🤝 Junho

Lucy: *lecture on being a good person and doing the right thing*

Max: Yeah, okay… my bad 🤷‍♂️

Max pissing off Dane

Dane: 😑

Read something else

Bitch PRIVATELY to friends

Write your own take on the premise (strongly recommend!)

All of the above

I've seen, quite a few times now, people saying that Erik in Phantom of the Opera is weird cuz he like "groomed" Christine. And acting like it took years.

CANONICALLY that's Not true. Like, what version are y'all reading? I've read the De Mattos & Ribiere translations. In Both of those, he's known Christine for months. 6-9 MAX.

He didn't get her while she was underage/in school. And he didn't go into this looking for a relationship. There's actually no fucking evidence of that anywhere in Leroux's novel (unless you know something from like the original French novel that's not in any of the translations that I have)

Her father died, Madame Valerius put her into the Paris conservatoire, she got accepted into the Opera Garnier.

She admits that she'd lost herself after her father's death. Raoul says that at the conservatoire she was like a souless, singing automaton. The ballet girls point out that a few months ago she was bleating.

Christine is NEW at the Opera. She's not some longstanding primadonna like Carlotta. She's like freshly 20yo.

Erik doesn't even call himself the Angel of Music until SHE asks if he is.

He just asks if she'll allow him to teach her.

Obviously Erik saw a sad, lonely new girl and offered help.

He goes quiet the day she mentions Raoul because I think it hits him that he's developed feelings. He comes back the next day and tells her that he can't keep teaching her if she's in love with someone else. He admits after he kidnaps her the 1st time that he fell in love with her.

Before that, he was fully committed to living his life in isolation, mildly harassing the directors and working on Don Juan. His PLAN was to finish it, lay down in the coffin and die, NOT to kidnap anyone or get married.

Erik is a character that spent a life of isolation, rejection, abuse and dehumanization, in the 19th century, he cannot live nor exist without being othered by people. His own mother was his first abuser, and he never knew love or human compassion. Of course he lashes out and acts cruelly and doesn't respect other's boundaries. He's deeply mentally ill and desperate to find even one bit of love and warmth he never had his entire life, but people take this and try to twist his character into some evil irredimable monster. Some people act like the mere fact he wants to be loved is an act of "selfishness/manipulation/grooming" itself.

"Needy, unable to cope" (<- you try coping with chronic pain)

"Comfort seeking" (<- you mean.. having a preference for not being in pain.. how criminal)

"Using or trying to obtain drugs on a long-term, chronic base" (<- do you understand what 'chronic pain' means.)

"Asking for pain med then returning to sleep."

"States he’s level 10 pain, but does not appear to be in pain (or ‘5= on appearance)." (<- it is well-known that chronic pain patients tend not to display pain in the same way as acute pain patients)

"Dramatic response to pain" (<- notice how this directly contradicts the comment above. you cannot win)

"Gets IV med, then leaves unit to smoke or walk around" (<- wow requiring medication and then going off to do something you needed pain meds to be able to do is so suspicious)

Married the love of my life at 50.

Got my Class A CDL at 59.

You've got time.

Black Menswear modelled by Black Men

oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?

and we're still building them?

while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?

uh. okay then