#thank you for your ask‚ nonny! it helped me refine my criticism of lnd and i much enjoyed answering it

[warpweighted]

Re Phantom: in the full unedited original version of the original book (the easy to find/cheapest original translation is unfortunately very edited, but most readers don't know this.) Christine’s feelings for both Erik and Raoul are not that clearly defined. She sees Raoul more as a safe option from feelings she cannot define and that would be frowned upon by society. Even Raoul senses this at points and keeps questioning Christine’s true intentions. I feel ALW only realised that he had been missing important clues from the book, which he tried to use in LND.

(In case you only know Poto from the movie: Christine was in her 20's when she arrived at the Opera in the og story and the whole thing happened in about three months.)

oh I didnt know that about the book! I read it in high school and presumably the library's copy was the abridged one. I cant speak to Christine's feelings in the book bc it has been a long ass time since I read it and at that point I had even less of a handle on what this 'romantic attraction' thing looks like than I do now lol

it may be that alw incorporated that into lnd, although I do still think it was a bad decision. like, a sequel that posits that in poto they were clinging to each other to get through their situation, and their romance was more focused on finally finding someone Safe with whom to escape the situation/ rescuing your childhood friend and being a support for her than it was on actual compatibility - that could definitely be interesting! It's not where I personally would want to take a poto sequel, because I dont find it to be suuuuper well supported in the musical, but then again theres not really any direction I'd want to take a poto sequel at all

however my issue with lnd's characterization is not that christine and raoul are having marital issues, it's that their character arcs were completely undone in service of the e/c endgame. christine went back to the man she spent the entirety of poto trying to escape from - and lnd argues that she chose wrong when she chose raoul, the man who did not isolate and terrorize her, over erik, the man who did. as a matter of fact lnd seems to just completely ignore that erik isolated and terrorized her, and that that's why she left him and stayed gone even after Erik did his heel-turn and let her go. and raoul became, like, cartoonishly shitty in order to make erik look good in comparison when his entire arc in poto is ceasing to be a domineering egotistical shithead, look how they massacred my boy etc

#to be accused of only having watched the movie... 😔😔😔 ive been SLANDERED (lighthearted‚ dont worry anon) #aiden.txt #poto #thank you for your ask‚ nonny! it helped me refine my criticism of lnd and i much enjoyed answering it #phantom of the opera #lnd