#everything else?

I'd hesitate to say he has any nefarious game to give away so much as proving that he has an immovable penchant for Non-Human Character Always Good/Cool/Antivillainhero and Humans Always Sucky Terrible Bad (Unless Purposefully Aided or Romanced by Non-Human). What his version of Frankenstein highlighted was that he is so unwavering in this narrative need that he will wring someone else's story's neck and dress up his preferred OC plot with the costume of that story's corpse.

Monster Must Always Be the Misunderstood Good.

Human Must Always Be the REAL VILLAIN.

Even if that requires gutting someone else's already-routinely-gutted story to fit his mold.

Notably, this entire thing would not have been an issue if only he had maintained his streak of original films with obvious influences. The Shape of Water is The Creature from the Black Lagoon's romantic twin. GDT's Frankenstein could have been called something else! Could've had different cast names! And I might have loved it as Frankenstein's GDT-flavored cousin! But as I've dwelled on that, I've also had to face a more bitter reality:

He is capable of showing original works true respect and love. As long as they fit his mold.

I know, because I recently watched his Pinocchio. Obviously wildly off the rails compared to the original fairy tale, but entirely upholding the wooden boy as the innocent he was, illustrating peril and adventure and the yanking of heartstrings along the way. It's a work of art that elevates the original tale.

Because Pinocchio was never human.

If he had been in the original fairy tale, I imagine he'd have been subjected to some Willy Wonka-level child-sized nightmare fuel to 'learn his lessons,' or made into a brat who only discovers humanity after being a puppet, or else GDT would simply never have touched the story to begin with.

For as earnest as I believe del Toro is when it comes to storytelling, to uplifting the Othered, and examining the evils of humanity through a fantastical lens, I don't think he's able to step too far outside his comfort zone of escapism via a superherofication of ghosts and bogeymen and folkloric entities as Always Actually Better Than Icky Humans. It's his brand, if nothing else.

Not even a Netflix show where he was playing the Rod Serling host figure, Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, escaped this. The only two stories where he had a writing credit in a whole series where the focus was on supernatural horror, were "Lot 36" and "The Murmuring." The former features a racist asshole getting eaten by a cosmic horror and the latter is about a haunting helping a woman deal with grief and opening up to her husband about the loss of their child. In other words, the stories where the supernatural is only there to land a heroic and/or helpful beat. Every other story in every other episode features the supernatural in a villainous full-horror role.

So, like. This isn't a grand reveal. Guillermo del Toro has made no secret of his preferred niche all this time. What's hitting a sour note for me and a lot of fans is how he holds that preference above respecting someone else's material, because to respect Mary Shelley's story in particular would get in the way of his blatantly contradictory fanfiction version of events. And he's doing so in a way that sounds remarkably flippant in interviews, painting over the whole thing as a ha ha wink at the camera affair with the source material while the author isn't looking~ all these stories are like mythology, really, so many ways to interpret it~

Coming from a man with so much talent, so much literacy and poetry in his work, that rings hollow. And whether we 'fight the good fight' for Frankenstein's actual canon, it still stings to know that the writer and director who seemed to champion the Other and to have such a deep love of the grotesque and the deeper meanings of horror is only willing to acknowledge characters that fit his inch-deep criteria of Cool Monster within that realm.

His Frankenstein says, in bright bloody beautifully gothic letters:

Human victims of inhuman violence and vengeance must have deserved it.

In fact, it was probably all human violence and evil in the first place.

In fact, the inhuman party was probably never guilty of anything, and was probably actively abused by his Creator and then never did anything wrong at all afterward, even after being maligned by the world.

In fact, Mary Shelley Victor Frankenstein was a liar and murderer the whole time and a True Monster, and a middle-aged man, not an adolescent, and all the death was his fault, and the Creature was a saintly inhuman hunk beast who Elizabeth wanted so bad and was not murdered by, and and and....

In fact, you, human audience, should never expect a human to exist in my stories without being there to prop up an inhuman star as their antagonist or love interest. Even at the cost of a classic work that you have read and loved and hoped would finally finally be understood and given the esteem that someone with my seeming comprehension and love for strange characters and stories would be able to do. Ha.

In fact, it was silly of you to ever expect anything different.