#sorelli

Hear me out these 2 (I've already forgotten their characters names gang) as Philippe and Sorelli

Read my new one shot on Ao3!

I present to you: my one shot for day four of POTO Fluff Week 2024 hosted by @textsfromthefifthbasement!

This is the second one for this challenge that I've written with @nerdywriter36! We had come up with the idea while on a call and couldn't resist another collab! The decision to make Erik a court joker was influenced heavily by our love of Jest from Marissa Meyer's Heartless, so it was only fitting that we use a quote from the novel for the title. We hope you all enjoy reading!

we know vicomte is 20/21 yr and phillippe is around 40 ?

Christine slouched on the couch, wrapped in her old robe. She dug into her pint of ice cream before turning on her TV. At three in the afternoon, she knew that she should have already gotten dressed for Christmas Eve. She had thought that enough time had passed since Mamma Valerius’s death that maybe things wouldn’t be so starkly lonely during the holidays, but oh, how wrong she was. 

Here be spoilers. In summary: they are deeply iconic.

The Good

The de Chagny brothers have pink hair.

Little Jammes the ballerina is actually a canonical catgirl who unionizes the dancers and leads the first ever opera house strike.

She eventually grows up to be a women’s rights activist and early suffragette.

The Persian is the one who gave Erik his name. In general, their relationship is approached in a heartwarming, heartwrenching, interesting way.

The game (and Raoul) criticize Philippe more actively, calling out his obsession with maintaining a family image compatible with class and gender norms, his infantilizing treatment of Raoul which is bad as well as tender, and his relationship with Sorelli compared with Raoul’s relationship with Christine.

The Persian tells off Raoul for judging the Persian government, pointing out his role as a colonizer.

Interestingly enough, Christine’s relationship with her father wasn’t perfect either — he used to get drunk and depressed and borderline abusive, and it helps to explain why she might be particularly vulnerable to Erik’s manipulation.

There’s a mini-arc where Christine rescues Meg Giry from being trapped in Box 5 by the managers and drugged by Erik.

Meg leads a troop of opera workers to look for Christine after the final kidnapping by Erik, separately from Raoul and the Persian. They’re the ones who end up finding Raoul after he almost drowns and taking him back to the opera house.

There’s basically high-key Megstine vibes overall.

Holy SHIT the ending...it’s no longer about Christine (who has been trying to save everyone but herself all along) showing yet more compassion to the Phantom or thinking she can change him. Instead, Christine tells him that he can’t control her anymore and that he’s nothing without bullying other people and that she doesn’t think he’s a monster for his face, but for his actions. He begs her to love him, if he changes, and she says that even if he does change, she still won’t owe him her love. She leaves with Melek without kissing him or taking his ring (although she still does promise to bury him after he dies).

When Erik says his final goodbye to the Persian, he calls him his name (Hatim in this game) instead of Daroga for the first and last time and they forgive each other but only when the other is out of earshot and I never thought a mobile game could make me cry but here I am.

There are two possible endings for Christine: either she goes off with Raoul to the beach where they spent their childhood summer together and get to know each other again and Raoul has learned not to pressure her to marry him and they take their time to reconnect, or she goes off alone and travels the world and sings for herself and never marries and ends up visiting her mother’s grave in Sweden.

The Bad

Instead of Christine losing Erik’s ring when she kisses Raoul like in the book, Raoul makes her give it to him and he chucks it off the roof of the opera house even though she told him quite clearly that taking it off would put her in danger.

Erik as the Angel of Music is so obviously creepy, controlling, and just kinda...mean from the beginning that I don’t really buy Christine’s initial loyalty towards him, or that she would believe he was the Angel.

Like, he really does genuinely seem to hate Christine and isn’t weirdly nice to her during the two weeks after the first kidnapping like he is in the book. He doesn’t like it when she expresses any emotions, talks about herself, or reads books.

As awesome as MazM Meg is, she is aged up and much more serious and caring, so we do lose Leroux’s sassy feral preteen Meg whom I love so dearly.

Everyone is so, SO mean to the Persian, and both Raoul and Erik and even you in the future (it’s a bit hard to explain) assign him way too much of the blame for how Erik turned out because when he was spending time with him in Persia he focused on making his life slightly less miserable instead of taking it upon himself to teach him right and wrong??

And then yeah the Persian is directly responsible for the Shah trying to have him murdered because he made up a rumor about him intending to get him exiled so he could leave the toxic environment of the Persian court but then the Shah decided to have the Persian execute him instead. But he still did end up saving his life at immense personal risk. And even fragile Erik recognized that. Plus he protected Raoul and Christine just because he thought it was the right thing to do. Why does the narrative keep trying to uncritically frame the Persian as selfish when he’s very much not??

The Baffling

The managers are legitimately evil now and try to frame Christine for the murder of Joseph Buquet for...reasons.

So Christine wasn’t Erik’s first “love.” Oh no. You see, he has a blind Turkish woman named Melek locked up in his basement after she refused to marry him. She used to be his interpreter and servant, and she was nice enough to him, and he thought she might love him because she was blind, but because she knew about the torture devices he built for the sultan, she spurned his advances. So he has imprisoned her for ten years now. Throughout the game, Christine tries to help her escape.

I don’t think the game designers realized that Jammes and Sorelli are last names (Jammes’ first name is actually Cécile in the book), and so they renamed them Jammes Petit and Sorelli Dupont.

Yeah Erik really didn’t convincingly change and while what Christine said to him was really important to her arc, I’m not sure if it made him act too differently. For example, he never chose to save Raoul for her sake — he never found out that he survived the torture chamber flooding and told Christine that he died.

The game even makes a point of having Erik call Christine “the cruel devil” several times after she makes him set her free (quite the opposite of book Erik calling her an “angel” later). On one hand it’s really good for Christine but on the other hand his reasons for giving up the Phantom and the money seem less clear.

This is the character design for the detective/narrator:

“Often malnourished and dressed in hand-me-downs, the “petits rats” of the ballet were vulnerable to social and sexual exploitation. And the wealthy male subscribers of the Paris Opera—nicknamed abbonés—were often on hand to exploit them.”

“Often, girls’ own mothers—who acted not unlike entertainment agents today—helped set up and maintain these relationships. For many Paris Opera ballerinas from poor backgrounds, a relationship with a rich man was their only chance at stability.”

Christine Daaé

‪✧‬ christine is a student in a university pretty well known in paris. ms. valerius paid for her tuition, yet christine is pretty average and struggles on her studies since her father died. she sings in between school periods in her room, where no one can hear her. she normally hangs around the campus or the library to read, she has some friends but prefers to have a small friend group. rarely goes out and is known to be the “timid but kind swedish girl”

‪✧‬ her fashion choice is feminine and modest - she doesn’t follow trends a lot, she wears a lot of flowery patterns and dresses, where the colours white and blue are predominant. she wears glasses for she suffers from myopia and can’t see from afar.

‪✧‬ she isn’t too keen to social media; she has instagram but only uses it to see what her friends are up to and has few followers. Her preferred apps are tumblr (where she follows aesthetic blogs) and soundcloud. she posts covers in soundcloud by the username “littlelotte”

‪Raoul De Chagny

‪✧‬ raoul is very well-known in university specially for his status as the “rich boy”. hiss older brother, Philippe, half-forced him to study law. everyone tries to get to know him and invite him to parties but he prefers staying at home. he is handsome and many girl have a crush on him but he still lingers in his childhood friend whom she hasn’t seen for 10 years. until one day he suddenly sees a girl on campus who looks a lot like his old friend.

‪✧‬ his clothing is very dark academia inspired and he wears a lot of long brown coats and white shirts.

‪✧‬ he does have social media, he uses twitter (specially to see the news when he wakes up) and instagram, where he keeps his name simply as “raoul c” so people don’t follow him and lurk on him only because of his financial and social status. he posts mainly pictures of pretty views he comes across with. he dislikes selfies and never posts his face.

Erik

‪✧‬ a part-time worker on the library of the university who only exclusively wears black. no one ever talks to him and he’s normally hidden between books of musical theology. once he peeked the sweet christine reading classic novels and got intrigued. everyday he finds her sitting alone in a table in the back of the library between a bunch of books about fairytales and gothic literature and daydreams about who the quiet girl might be.

‪✧‬ one day he catches her scrolling through soundcloud with earphones on and catches a glimpse of her soundcloud username. he became her first follower on soundcloud.