Go Vicube Go!! Go Vicube Go!!

Okay but the gradual shift of Victor referring to others as "people" to "his people" to "fellow creatures" to "creatures" and how it parallels the shift of Victor calling the creature a "monster" to "devil" to "creation" to "man" to show how he only finds kinship in his sins does any one else see this

victor frankenstein the type of guy to say “the world just wasnt ready for my ideas” and the idea was an 8-foot tall homonculus he constructed out of graverobbed body parts 

the t in victor stands for tboy swag

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for some reason people seem to think that mary somehow stumbled into writing a commentary on marriage/incest accidentally, and that the themes of frankenstein are all about her trauma due to her experiences as a victim of the patriarchy, as a woman and a mother surrounded by men - as if she wasnt the child of radical liberals who publicly renounced marriage, as if she herself as well as percy shelley had similar politics on marriage, as if she would not go on to write a novel where the central theme is explicitly that of father/daughter incest years later…

the most obvious and frequent critique of victor i see is of his attempt to create life - the creature - without female presence. it’s taught in schools, wrote about by academics, talked about in fandom spaces - mary shelley was a feminist who wrote about feminism by making victor a misogynist. he’s misogynistic because he invented a method of procreation without involving women purely out of male entitlement and masculine arrogance and superiority, and shelley demonstrates the consequences of subverting women in the creation process/and by extension the patriarchy because this method fails terribly - his son in a monster, and victor is punished for his arrogance via the murder of his entire family; thus there is no place for procreation without the presence of women, right?

while this interpretation – though far from my favorite – is not without merit, i see it thrown around as The interpretation, which i feel does a great disservice to the other themes surrounding victor, the creature, the relationship between mother and child, parenthood, marriage, etc.

this argument also, ironically, tends to undermine the agency and power of frankenstein’s female characters, because it often relies on interpreting them as being solely passive, demure archetypes to establish their distinction from the 3 male narrators, who in contrast are performing violent and/or reprehensible actions while all the woman stay home (i.e., shelley paradoxically critiques the patriarchy by making all her female characters the reductive stereotypes that were enforced during her time period, so the flaws of our male narrators arise due to this social inequality).

in doing so it completely strips elizabeth (and caroline and justine to a lesser extent) of the power of the actions that she DID take — standing up in front of a corrupt court, speaking against the injustice of the system and attempting to fight against its verdict, lamenting the state of female social status that prevented her from visiting victor at ingolstadt, subverting traditional gender roles by offering victor an out to their arranged marriage as opposed to the other way around, taking part in determining ernest’s career and education in direct opposition to alphonse, etc. it also comes off as a very “i could fix him,” vibe, that is, it suggests if women were given equal social standing to men then elizabeth would have been able to rein victor in so to speak and prevent the events of the book from happening. which is a demeaning expectation/obligation in of itself and only reinforces the reductive passive, motherly archetypes that these same people are speaking against

it is also not very well supported: most of the argument rests on ignoring female character’s actual characterization and focusing one specific quote, often taken out of context (“a new species would bless me as its creator and source…no father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as i should deserve theirs”) which “proves” victor’s sense of male superiority, and on victors treatment/perception of elizabeth, primarily from a line of thinking he had at five years old, where he objectified her by thinking of her (or rather — being told so by caroline) as a gift to him. again, the morality of victor’s character is being determined by thoughts he had at five years old.

obviously this is not at all to say i think their relationship was a healthy one - i dont think victor and elizabeth’s marriage was ever intended to be perceived as good, but more importantly, writing their relationship this way was a deliberate critique of marriage culture.

In the clerb(al) we all fam(kenstein)

It’s weird that in all the essays I read on Frankenstein none of them have noted that Victor is heavily transmasculine-coded. Like he hits on a weirdly large number of transmasculine, particularly gay transmasculine experiences that are relevant today:

pregnancy and childbirth as traumatic and horrible yet unstoppable experiences that are totally foreign to nature

obsessive fantasies and ideation of an ideal masculine body

society finding your fantasized idealized male form monstrous and especially dangerous to children

being punished for recognizing that women are capable of independence and therefore can be as monstrous as their male counterparts

parents wishing for a real daughter when all they have is you

feigning attraction to a woman, any woman, for some scrap of masculinity, even though it’s obvious you’re not actually interested

weird esoteric historical interests that everyone around you denigrates as useless that you keep doing anyway

falling for your male best friend in a totally gay way

physically and mentally falling apart because of an unexplainable secret

trying to reveal the unexplainable secret getting shrugged off as impossible and you’re considered crazy — even your best friend seems to think it’s due to trauma you can’t articulate rather than what you’re actually literally saying

creating the man “responsible” for destroying your family and being a menace to society

I’m sure there’s more but that’s all I can think of off the top of my head. And yet cis people still keep pushing stories of girls dressing up as boys to experience the glory of war as transmasculine experiences. Why.

im fgonna say it. victor wasn’t in the wrong for not taking care of creature 

I had a dream where you were in jail and every time someone mentioned you your pfp would appear and it got to the point where I started hating it

hey this is really funny. ill never be over this. why was i in jail what were my crimes

Folks often make fun of the fact that Ernest says "my brother" instead of "our brother" during the Frankensteins' reunion after William's death as if throwing shade at Victor but like

There's some 10-ish years age gap between Ernest and William, for Victor and William it's 17. William was most likely not even a year old when Victor left to university and there's been radio silence from him ever since. Victor and William literally don't know each other, for pretty much William's whole life Ernest has been his only brother. It was just the two of them and Liz, Victor was never part of it. So it's natural that Ernest would slip like that.

Victor lost the idea of a brother but Ernest actually lost a brother