What Up, I'm Robert, I'm 28, I'm Gay, And I Never Fuckin' Learned How To Read.

i miss my first true love peter wiggin

”this video is made possible by ingolstadt morgue. not sponsored” victor says while breaking and entering

I was rereading Volume III of Frankenstein and I have some things to say about my favorite boy, Henry Clerval.

At the start of the book, the first thing we know about Clerval is that he is a poet whose dream is being frustrated because his father wants him to be an extent of his businesses and fails to understand why Henry would want an education when those things are “superfluous in the commerce of ordinary life”.

Being a merchant is not what disturbs Henry, but the idea of not having another choice; forcing him to be an ignorant who only lives in conformism with no purpose of his own is tortuous enough to make him loathe that path of existence, leading to a desperation and need to escape those restraints and feel that he has a potential that goes beyond the restrictions that have so plagued his daily life.

That's why I think the way in which Henry describes the places that he and Victor visited across Europe is more than just a pretty description of the landscape. The burst of inspiration that he experiments becomes much more personal considering how Victor says that he is feeling "a happiness rarely tasted by man" and Clerval himself lasts a whole page talking in heavy detail about the wonders he can appreciate.

The passion that Henry feels in the journey is so extreme and magical that he is convinced that he found a paradise where all the worlds he created in his head are finally taking form, allowing him to have a perspective that's so much more than Geneva's frozen mountains, even wanting to live forever in England because there he found the fulfillment that he so long sought for.

The delight of Clerval was proportionally greater than mine; his mind expanded in the company of men of talent, and he found in his own nature greater capacities and resources than he could have imagined himself to have possessed while he associated with his inferiors. “I could pass my life here,” said he to me; “and among these mountains I should scarcely regret Switzerland and the Rhine.”

Henry is deeply unsatisfied with the life that has been dictated to him, being in constant search of some place where the sensibility of his heart can flourish and can prove that the person he wishes to be isn't conditioned by the impediments that were told to him during his childhood.

Those aspirations and emotions are the ones that create both his contrast and similarity with Victor; the two of them are equally ambitious and therefore are the ones that know best how to understand each other when everything is going downwards. Henry takes care of Victor when the repent of his actions is too much to allow him to get out of bed and provides him with at least a meager pinch of hope that things will get better, and Victor, even though it's through a eulogy, makes sure to preserve Clerval's memory telling to anyone who would listen about the incomparable potential and kindness that still comforts his poor soul beyond the grave.

Henry's death is cruel in all the ways it can be. It not only takes away the last solace that Victor had, leading him to an extreme of despair that leaves him with no reason for existing. But also makes sound all of Henry's plans for the future like the prayers of a moribund; he stops being a person to become only a tragedy sentenced to be forgotten in the distant shores of Ireland, where he is only a stranger that no one can give a cry to.

Maybe I'm looking too much into it, but this book scares you not for the fact that there's a living corpse, but for the fact that there is no place for hope, and you slowly realize how doomed the situation is while you are forced to see how the misfortune develops, so I wouldn't be surprised if all the possibilities of Henry living a fulfilling life were only shown to be taken away by a whim of fate.

i love herbert west and his radioactive testosterone 

i cannot believe the common consensus around here is that walton is boring and less deserving of interest than the other narrators when in his literal introduction hes like. im a daydreamer and hopeless romantic. im an orphan. i love my sister. i went against my fathers dying wishes and pursued life as a seafarer. im self-educated. im illiterate. im a failed poet. im feminine and proud. im into pop culture. i bitterly feel the want of a (boy)friend. im gay.

Fascinating trend I’ve noticed from lurking in Frankenstein-related tags:

If there’s a male construct, people frame him as the creator’s child. He has full agency and personhood and deserves to be raised in a family. The most obvious example of this is Frankenstein’s Creature, but you’ll see echoes of it with creators of robots, Pinocchio, etc.

If there’s a female construct, people frame it as expected that she’s created to be a romantic/sexual object. I saw a few posts that Pygmalion is morally superior to Victor Frankenstein because he fell in love with his creation, for instance. I don’t need to go into the dozens of “make a female robot and fall for her” tropes.

The most uncomfortable intersection of this dichotomy are the countless posts insisting that it was Victor’s duty as a father to create a female to gift to his son—and that the “wait but she’ll be an actual person of her own” reservations Victor had in the book were immoral. He owes his son (male construct = family, agency, personhood) the gift of a person (female construct = object, no agency, not family). She wouldn’t be a daughter, just “the Bride.” Nothing about Víctor owing her happiness, but the exact opposite: that she must be custom-designed to be miserable and rejected so she’d be trapped with the male-creature.

For a piece of literature where personhood is such a central theme, it’s a disturbing and disappointing trend.

poor Victor Frankenstein I'm projecting every shit I ever had in my life on them

Girl the egg ☹☹ girl the bird ☹☹☹☹☹ girl it flies to god ☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹ girl that gods name is abraxas ☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹

happy international lesbian day to victor frankenstein henry clerval robert walton elizabeth lavenza justine moritz louis manoir and ernest frankenstein

thank you charlie