everlasting true love, i am yours

Rose Brocaded Satin Dinner Dress

c. 1892

And I think that’s a really stupid and boring interpretation, but more to the point, citing Ozymandias actively works against both del Toro’s interpretation and Frankenstein as a cultural object. Victor isn’t Ozymandias in the film. The monster survives him. Victor’s “colossal wreck” lives on, while he is the one who fades into obscurity. Like it’s a direct inversion of the poem lol. Which like, I guess you can do that…? But I don’t get the feeling that del Toro was doing an inversion. And Victor is trying to destroy his own creation! A substantial part of Ozymandias is about the folly of conquest and expansion. How do you account for the fact that Victor travelled to the ends of the earth to destroy his own “empire”? Are we to understand that his hubris is what drives his need to destroy the monster, much like Ozymandias’ ego led to his empire’s fall? Going even further, a fundamental part of empire and conquest is violence, but the monster is only ever violent in self defence in the film. Del Toro omits all of its “sins” it committed in the novel. But you cannot have it both ways - the monster cannot be a symbolic empire and then also be pure and sinless. Victor cannot be a conqueror and also actively trying to ruin his own conquest.

And on a broader cultural level, Victor also cannot be Ozymandias. His name has been permanently transferred to the monster in the cultural imagination - people call the monster “Frankenstein,” not Victor, whereas Ozymandias only has his name left (nothing beside remains). And, unlike kingdoms and empires, which have existed for so long that most of them have been completely forgotten (which is another element of the poem), Victor created a thing that has never existed before. The monster is not an empire or kingdom. It is impossible for Victor to fade into obscurity or for his works (ye mighty) to be forgotten, because he has permanently changed the world. A much better analog is the Soviet Union - it fell decades ago, but Sputnik remains and will always remain. It’s not something that can be forgotten. There was a humanity that existed prior to us sending an object into space, and a humanity that existed afterwards, and those are two distinct humanities. The monster is much the same.

I’ve talked a lot recently about the conflation of death and marriage in ancient literature, and the most obvious manifestation of that in myth is Persephone, for whom marriage and death are literally the same thing. By marrying Hades, she goes down to the Underworld and disappears from the world of the living, which constitutes a death (as she is a god, it is less than permanent, but still a death). One of the genius things about Hadestown is how well it plays into these ancient tropes and themes with its very modern take on myth. Specifically, I can’t stop thinking about Way Down Hadestown, which is the song of Persephone’s wedding and funeral.

This time, we bring you a story that is the dictionary definition of josei manga: Wedding Dress by Riyoko Ikeda.

When Eric, who also kindly proofread this script for us, mentioned that Ikeda had a manga where the protagonist plots revenge through a wedding dress, I knew I had to find it.

Said manga is compiled in the first volume of Ikeda Riyoko's Short Story Collection published in 1988 with the same name and another collection of short stories from 2014, Kaze no Joukei (Wedding Dress is only in the print version, not the digital version). But luckily, this short story also has two digital releases: One is included in vol.2 of Aoi Zakuro, and the other is a single-story digital release. I got the second one.

Some more digging told me that this manga was first published in issue No.5 of Monthly Seventeen's Special Issue YOU in 1981. I couldn't find an image of the cover of the magazine, but I trust where I do my digging: Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library of Manga and Subculture has scans of old Puff issues with the list of ALL the manga published in a given year. It reminds me of how we used to get our desired information before the internet, and I love it.

DDL MangaDex