Ghost River

The piano ticking at the start of Something Wicked.

The silent periods in Brave New World.

The silence before the Everglow scream.

The third verse in TokSik.

Repeating the bridge of Perfect Machine.

The Guitars in the final chorus of Dark Things.

The falsetto after the Bringing It Down Scream

The violins in Tunnelvision.

Any of the whisper singing in Silos, Brave New World, Dark Things, or Degenerate.

The entire bridge of Otherworldly.

The strings on It Has Begun's outro.

The Ricochet bridge plot-twist.

Ad Astra in its entirety.

The set up for the final chorus of Devolution.

The Second verse into the second chorus of Frequency.

The radar pings at the start of Dark Things.

Telekinetic going full djent in the bridge.

Monster and My Demons having cello intros.

Diving Bell's entire bridge and outro.

"My heart's an artifice, a decoy soul"

But adaptations often don’t understand why he’s bad, and make him bad for the wrong reasons.

In the book, Javert is bad because he’s a cop. He is the “Best Cop It is Possible to Be,” he’s honest and completely obedient to the law, and he’s TERRIBLE, because you can’t be “good” when you’re enforcing a system that is inherently cruel.

But like... in Les Mis 1998 Javert is portrayed as being an unusually evil person who just has a weird obsession with Valjean, unlike other cops, who are Good. Les Mis 1998 even adds a Good Cop side character who lets Valjean go free in Montreuil-sur-Mer, while joking with Valjean about how Javert is unusually evil and none of the other cops like him.

???????

And as I’ve ranted about a lot, BBC Les Mis Javert’s desire to enforce the law is portrayed as a good honorable quality, and there’s an entire precinct of “good cop” side characters who help him.....while BBC Javert’s actual “moral failing” is what Andrew Davies calls his “twisted love” for Valjean.

and I’m just like...eh? Javert is bad, yes!! But that’s noT WHY he’s bad. He’s not bad because he’s gay, he’s bad because he’s a cop. He’s not bad because he’s an unusually evil cop, he’s actually an unusually “good” cop— and being a “good cop” is why he’s bad and cruel!

Another crucial aspect of Javert’s character, the one that adaptations always ignore, the one that actually is the Reason he is so obsessed with upholding the law - flawlessly, mercilessly, perfectly - is his heritage. Canonically, he is Romani, and the world saw him as a criminal since he was a child. He is desperate to prove himself to a society that does not care for him; and to erase that is to vastly limit the depth and complexity of his character and his interactions with Valjean.

The reason he commits suicide in the end is because he realizes that he wasted his life in this vain pursuit; but another facet of that tragedy is that even if he had attempted to start a different, better life at some point, the world’s prejudice would have followed him regardless - in a way that it never did Valjean. Javert knows that, and the resulting bitterness directly informs his obsession with bringing Valjean to “justice.”