#this chapter<3

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQ

"Why did you destroy my hyung-nim's house?"

my hyung-nim

my hyung-nim

I just hkadvakhsjahsjshsjgajshabzjaha

How far their relationship have come TvT

Also, the agents of destructions and pope ad bishops and the princes kneeling down and greeting him

This chapter is so charming.

I’m not sure how I can possibly add to the discussions already out there. It’s our largest glimpse inside Enjolras’s head, and he’s so full of warmth for his friends and hope for the future, as well as the logistics of the massive plan of revolutionary action he seems to carry around with him at all times. I love this.

And Grantaire! Hugo manages something remarkable in so little here--we get the full portrait of where Grantaire is in his arc in so few words. I know how many people in this fandom have written Grantaire, and how so very, very few capture this dynamic in a way that feels right to me--he’s at once hangdog and annoying and full of warmth, even as he proves himself totally incapable of being good for anything for the five zillionth time.

I’ve said before that the relationship between Enjolras and Grantaire feels to me like Charlie Brown and Lucy and the football (Enjolras is Charlie Brown, Grantaire is Lucy, the football is whether Grantaire is ever going do anything useful) and that’s what I’m getting from it this time, too.

And that’s really interesting, because that’s so absolutely not the power relationship Grantaire thinks is there.

Grantaire calls Enjolras an “ingrate,” hearkening back to Fauchelevent accusing Jean Valjean of ingratitude for forgetting a man who’s life he saved. It’s Grantaire’s way of gesturing at--without quite understanding it himself--that Enjolras is saving him, and that there’s something really complicated and uncomfortable about how one-sided it is that Grantaire’s whole life is bound up in this and Enjolras is only tolerating him and not thinking about him too hard.

People who save another person have, this book says, some duty to reckon with what they’ve done and with the saved person as a person.

Grantaire acts out in this odd, immature way that’s predicated on his belief that all the power is in Enjolras’s hands, and his own words and actions are immaterial. Enjolras asks for sincerity, and Grantaire, like a bratty teenager, ducks around the point with constant wordplay that begs for affection and respect while perpetually undermines both. He’s acting like a middle-schooler with a crush, really--which he declares in ways that he has actively guaranteed are impossible to take seriously or acknowledge. He won’t say “I believe in you” sincerely until the day of the barricade.

It’s a symptom of depression, I suppose, or of whatever brainweirdness Grantaire has, that he can’t see his actions matter the way other people’s actions matter, or that he could take action in the world the way other people take action, or that his belief that Enjolras is up on a pedestal and he himself is the lowly worm offering to polish his boots (also word play, of course; I believe it was slang for kissing up) only exists in Grantaire’s head, not in real life.

Grantaire seems to keep offering and withdrawing Lucy’s football in the belief that he’s the only one who gets hurt when he pulls it back. He doesn’t see Enjolras gather up his faith and go to kick the football and fall on his ass again--he just sees the consequences to himself afterwards, in Enjolras’s presumed disappointment with him. He’s sabotaging himself, and he thinks he’s only sabotaging himself.

But, of course, Grantaire is the incarnation of the bourgeoisie Hugo has spent the last five chapters begging and cajoling for the love of God to stop just sitting there. He’s more charming than most of them in that his inaction is arising more from obvious brainweasels than from true indifference. And he’s trying harder than most of them, because he’s here, trying to let Enjolras save him even as he sabotages that impulse and that relationship in every way he can.