The thing that people tend to miss about Fahrenheit 451 is that the people in that book were complicit in the censorship of their media. They turned away. They stopped paying attention. They chose not to argue when history ceased to be taught. Not only that, but from their government’s perspective, they were pleased and easily ready to do so.
I talked to a girl on TikTok a few months back who said, “I think we would all feel better if they just stopped teaching history”. Maybe we would, but that’s how these sorts of stories always start. Do not become complicit in the unraveling of society because self-examination is hard for you. I promise you, you can do hard things. It might be a train wreck but it’s our train wreck and people will need help, as terrifying as it is, we cannot look away.
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I’m so obsessed with the Death and the Maiden trope
Related fandoms: Fallout (Cooper | The Ghoul & Lucy), PotO (Erik & Christine)
CW | Power dynamics, gendered language, old ass men, general awfulness
Death - the older man, the sorcerer, the life taker
The Maiden - the innocent, the naive, the life giver
No one comes away from Death unscathed. Especially not the Maiden.
This story is as much about the shadow self, what’s repressed or feared in the Maiden, as it is about what happens when Death wants to dance with her.
It’s hard for the Maiden to maintain herself while also accepting the darkness. It's debatable, but it can’t be done with the way society currently exists. Death is the inevitable. Who we will all tangle with one day, who will transform us whether we want it or not.
His transformative power is often used to hurt.
COOPER!
Death hurts others and, through his actions, hurts himself.
ERIK!
Death does not discriminate, but to take the Maiden is the ultimate win. To bring the life-giving force down to his level and make her face the ugliness that is him. She learns him, his allure, and relents to it.
If an old ass man has ever ruined you, you know exactly what I mean.
Often times, the Maiden's first encounter with Death ranges from rape to dubious consent. It's this ugliness that is hard to ignore. And yet, stories wherein the Maiden not only choses Death first, but expressly seeks him out, receive the same hesitant reaction.
The message is the same: the Maiden should remain unchanged. Should never have to encounter Death in the first place.
Christine's encounter with Erik is how she learns how strong she is. How she braves the face of death where she once cowered is admirable. Lucy's encounter with Cooper shows that her core is unshakably kind. That even in grim circumstances, she will not be reduced to Death like he has.
The Maiden comes out of these stories intensely scathed. She is not the same after her encounter with Death. No longer naive, she is ruthless. Fearless. Strong.
She’s who I wanna be, god dammit!
When she makes peace with Death, when she chooses to make peace with Death, she makes peace with her mortality. The Maiden also makes peace with the animal parts of herself which society deems lesser in women. Mainly lust.
Death once wished to destroy her, to turn her life giving force into something evil, but it is still up to the Maiden what she chooses to do with her new gifts - the gift of coming home to yourself, number one. In embracing these, she engages in alchemy.
Why hath the witch been so scorned?
Power. The Maiden becomes witch once she has tangled with Death. The pain through vulnerability uncovers truths she has already known in herself. Death is not fearsome to her anymore, but a close friend she goes to for guidance. Who, after her transformation, now fears her as much as she feared him in the beginning.
And Death, in tangling with his maiden, regains an appreciation for life.
Hello? The way Cooper goes from manhandling Lucy to gently asking her to accompany him on the biggest quest of his life?
Death learns to be discerning, to take those whose time has come and spare more unfortunate "Maidens" from his terror. Death and the Maiden become one when the Maiden undergoes her transformation.
Death is not inherently evil, but he is scary. It would be easier for us to believe that he’s out to get us. It’s up to the Maiden, when she encounters him, whether she remains fearful, hides from her potential, or whether she embraces him and transforms into something greater than she was.
Society might wish for her to stay a fearful Maiden so she presents no threat to the way of things as Death does. And if Death is embraced, through the transformation of the Maiden, they birth a world worth living in.
i really need to have a talk with the tgcf fandom about the use of the term 'parallel'. because. my friends. sometimes there are things that have similarities and differences that are interesting to make comparisons on but they ARE NOT PARALLELS. and trying to force them into that relationship to each other actually robs the comparison of their nuance. or just plain sense and accuracy. the amount of times lately i see a meta announcing something is parallel when, sure, if you zoom out really far and look at in pure generalization from a distance you could say it is parallel. like if you were in an airplane looking down on two tiny cars travelling on parallel roads... but then if you get closer you would find that the roads are very different. they're going the same way at times and taking similar directions but other times doing very different things and then eventually turn off and go their own way. it can be interesting to look at how their differences and similarities add meaning and depth compared to just look at them on their own. but you have to do all kinds of revision on the source material to make these two things fit the interpretation that they are parallel. and that that conclusion of a parallel relationship was already decided on before looking closely! any kind of analysis, scientific, literary, whatever, you don't decide on your theory before you do the research, you observe what you are analyzing and let yourself be open to whatever relationships you can see and let an interpretation emerge from that!! in general there seems like a weird over emphasis on literary analysis terms and theories and labels and taking any stray element of tgcf that has anything to do with a literary analysis term and shoehorn it into this literary theory framework to extrapolate a whole interpretation of the book more based on fitting the story into the literary framework than letting the story show the relationships and frameworks it is building itself. the amount of "this is what mxtx is saying because this is what happened in shakespeare" ???!!!?! just read the book and let it show you what its saying you don't need to hamfist it into the structure of a shakespearean tragedy!! "parallel characters" are not the only valuable relationships to analyze, sometimes characters are kind of different and kind of similar and comparing them can be cool. and is much more interesting than distorting the full story to construct a parallel that isnt there. just leave all the fancy literary terminology aside till you know how to let your observations of a story dictate your interpretation, and stop trying to leave out whole parts of the story that don't fit with your literary analysis framework. see the story on its own terms PLEASE
reading a lot more “historical fiction YA novels” and the presentism is so irritating it really sucks me out of the story and breaks immersion
I beg you stop inserting your modern ideals into a time period and characters where having that mindset wouldn’t have made sense and made you a pariah in your local town, or at least make their quirky mindset have consequences
it’s okay if a likeable character has a mindset or belief you personally disagree with, it doesn’t make you a worse person or writer for having included it!
liberal/leftist characters good! conservative bad! is one of the tropes that make my eyes roll so far back into my head i can see my brain
"I on the other hand am a prosecutor. and the character in question is Book!Jekyll". Drop the callout post, Eddie XD
WJEHKEHEJEHE YOU ASKED FOR THIS. Grab some popcorns and a drink cause this is gonna be a LONG one:
✨Dr. Henry Jekyll callout post✨
[An essay about repression, responsibility and reputation]
Part 1. A disclaimer
I would like to start this essay by actually saying that while I think that Henry Jekyll (Jerk-yll, if you will) is a dick, most if not all his actions are actually imputable to his environment; aka, Jekyll is an asshole, but he was a repressed man living in Victorian High Society. Sooner or later he was bound to snap.
So Victorian Society is mostly to blame.
Keyword being mostly.
Part 2. Taking responsibility
While our actions are often the product of external forces, I don’t believe we can just point our finger outward when we are being questioned about our actions, and completely shift the blame externally.
Very personal example: if I snap at my brother, who hasn’t done anything wrong, because I’ve been under so much stress from work or whatever, I have to take responsibility for my outburst and apologize.
Because I did a wrong. So I must hold myself accountable, even when external factors influence my actions.
You know what rubs me the wrong way about Jekyll?
He admits to doing bad things,
WHILE ALSO NOT SHOWING MUCH REMORSE AND PAINTING HIMSELF AS THE VICTIM MOST OF THE TIME.
“yeah I killed a man, but,,, Hyde made me 🥺🥺🥺 I am soooo disgusted and shaken by Hyde’s actions,,,,,, 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 I was literally scared for my life,,,,, pwease feel bad for me,,,,,,,” - quote, Jekyll probably.
Well, since I mentioned Hyde, why don’t we talk about him for a moment?
Part 3. Jekyll Jekyll Hyde, Jekyll Hyde Hyde Jekyll
Different adaptations take many different approaches when describing the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde. In most adaptations I find that they are treated more as two separate consciousnesses (god I’m glad this isn’t a video cause I never want to try to pronounce that word out loud-), each with different memories and goals. (Like in TGS. Hyde and Jekyll can even have conversations with one another, as if they were two separate people living in one body.)
The book however… takes a bit of a messier route.
At the start of Henry’s full statement of the case, we get this:
“[…] but managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted […].”
“Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations […]. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, […]”
Excerpt From The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
From these two quotes we get 2 very important pieces of info:
1. Jekyll knew full well what he intended to do. Some adaptations seem to imply that Jekyll thought his potion would literally split him in two, and so his experiment went wrong (woe is him 😒), but this is not the case. He purposefully made a potion that made him look like a gremlin and made his good morals disappear while he looked like a gremlin.
2. JEKYLL IS HYDE. “Well duh” I hear you say, but this is important. Hyde isn’t just a part of Jekyll that is granted agency. Jekyll talks about Hyde with first person pronouns. He is in control of his actions. Sure, when Jekyll looks like Edward Hyde he also shifts his alignment from Lawful good Jerk to Chaotic Evil, but that’s still him in the driver seat.
It’s like the potion is alcohol. Edward Hyde is just a very drunk Henry Jekyll. He is still himself, just without any filters that would normally stop him from making bad choices. Drunk people however aren’t free of responsibility. (Au contraire, in the eyes of the law it can become an aggravating factor.)
All this to say, Henry can’t just “blame it on Hyde”. That would be a very stupid thing to do.
And yet that’s EXACTLY WHAT HE DOES.
Part 4. But this is just a theory- A LITERARY THEORY
Time to get the tinfoil hats out friends cause I am here to tell you that Dr. Henry motherfucking Jekyll is lying in his full statement of the case.
“It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse;”
“He, I say—I cannot say, I”
“Hyde in danger of his life was a creature new to me; […]Yet the creature was astute; mastered his fury with a great effort of the will; composed his two important letters, one to Lanyon and one to Poole; and that he might receive actual evidence […]”
“this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself.”
Excerpt From The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
………you’re seeing what I’m seeing, right?
In the beginning of the last chapter Henry calmly explains that Jekyll is Hyde. They’re one and the same. All the horrible things Hyde did? That’s all Jekyll baby.
..and yet, mid chapter Jekyll suddenly does a complete 180° and switches pronouns. Suddenly Henry Jekyll wants to distance himself from Edward Hyde. Suddenly Hyde isn’t a twisted reflection of himself. Hyde is a creature. A monster. Hyde is not Jekyll.
And that’s what Jekyll wants us to believe.
He wants to save face. He knows that Hyde did monstrous things and can’t let that reputation stain the good name of Jekyll.
So midway through his final statement he alienates Hyde from himself, and in the process he became a victim. A martyr to his own scientific curiosity. An Icarus, whose sole fault was flying just a bit too close to the sun.
In his final statement Jekyll doesn’t take responsibility. He saves his reputation is what he does.
Part 5. In which I pull the rug from underneath you
I really really really like Dr. Henry Jekyll.
And I mean it!! The man is an asshole, he cares more about his reputation than anything else, he is LYING in what was supposed to be a final confession… and I love him. I love this bastard so much.
Robert Louis Stevenson really did an amazing job writing this character and I love how complex and flawed he is.
I love that I can reread the last chapter infinitely and see new details pop up each time. A change of pronouns here, a particular choice of words there…
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i love audiobooks. reading in the traditional sense is very intimate and helps you practice patience, imagination, empathy. but listening to a voice actor read out the words to you is a whole experience. they play around with different pitches, accents, intonations. instead of coming home and feeling guilty about reading something else than Academia Stuff so I end up not reading at all, now i can listen to an audiobook on my way to uni, while i'm cooking, while i'm cleaning. it turns mundane tasks into a safe space for me to move my body while my mind is far away on this journey through my imagination. so cool. i'll always love reading and actually sitting down with a book in my hand and giving it all my attention, but as someone who struggles to manage my time and feels guilty about not reading enough, this is heaven.
I was on a Virgin Suicides post discussing the themes of the movie and this person really tried to tell me that the girls were dumb snd crybabies for killing themselves because they were beautiful and could've easily a found a boyfriend or husband to run away from the house with?????
Did you watch the movie??? Like any of it
A major thing was that there WERE beautiful and desired by the boys to the point of objectification and treated as achievements. Any connection they found with them was ditched by entitled boys who didn't see the point continuing a relationship afterward
Not even to mention the issues of four young girls splitting up and fully relying on random men they met in secret to escape, it would not be that easy and be one bad situation to another
Some people should not be allowed to have the internet, like watchhhh the movie, have a shred of thoughts about it
I’m a classy lady on Tumblr and I do not speak badly of fan writing because it’s a wonderful free gift and we are blessed and I love this community. And we’re all learning and growing and that’s fantastic! If a fic is not working for me, then it’s not for me and that’s fine.
But I’m a whiny bitch in my irl book club that’s reading published books because anything published is taking space that could have gone to a better writer (like my friends who are trying to get published) and when the chosen book is absolutely terrible I’m just so frustrated about it.
Gave up even trying to read the latest book and took it to two libraries (the first was in the wrong county whoops) and made the librarians read the first page and THEIR LIL JUDGEY EYEBROWS SAID IT ALL OMFGSH. This book is not good.
It’s been returned now and it can’t hurt me anymore. 😂😂😂
Not going to name it here though because that’s not ladylike (and what if the author is on Tumblr 👀👀👀). Feel free to insert your least favorite book into this story in your head.
