#this is also identical to my enjolras blonde post | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

adamsvanrhijn · 5 years

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ok to clarify some posts from a few days ago:

i do not think that anyone needs to justify Why they want a character to be something, where “something” is like, an identity trait. like, i don’t need a reason for wanting combeferre to be the era-equivalent of a gay man (this phrasing is reductive but y’all know what i mean). i can just want that and that’s fine. whether my reasoning is “because i am a lesbian and like to write fanfic about gay people” or “because i think him and enjolras having unresolved sexual tension is incredibly hot” or “because he just gives off a gay vibe idk” it wouldn’t like, matter, at all.

again. anyone reading/writing this post is well within their rights to think that combeferre is gay, or that enjolras and cosette are long lost siblings, or that grantaire has four serious and expensive medical conditions that the amis must raise money for, is both salty and bisexual, and that he was a soldier in the war of 1812 and an insurgent in soviet russia and has deep and accurate knowledge of the israeli-palestinian conflict and that this is why he is opposed to devoting any energy to political action whatsoever or whatever the fuck is trendy nowadays. i don’t care why you want that, or necessarily understand why, but like, want all you want. i’m not taking that away or telling you that you cannot want that.

but when i CREATE FANWORK, and include my desires and realize them as headcanons and/or plot elements in my fanwork, i feel that it needs to be a justifiable choice within the work for the work to be good. my instinct is to say that a fic where grantaire was all of the above things would not work very well or be very good because it doesn’t make any sense. like, for one thing, france has socialized healthcare and one of the best cancer treatment systems in the world, so why would the amis need to raise money for his leukaemia where his symptoms are exactly the same as in jodi picoult’s 2004 drama novel my sister’s keeper, ET CETERA.

anyway, to be less bitchy:

if Combeferre canonically was said to be looking at women and judging them on their aesthetic value and desiring to include them in his collection [of mistresses] then it would take a lot more work and in-story character work for me to believably write him as a gay man. if he had had that canonical characterization, i would maybe want to write about combeferre using heterosexual posturing as a mask for his deepest, most intimately emotional but also sexual love, which is for his best friend enjolras*, or at least like, reference his past as a person who interacted with women in a manner implying sexual contact.

Combeferre is not those things, canonically; but he does have some other opinions on women that he gets a whole monologue about, so in some cases it could be appropriate for me to look at how he would relate to women. on a different note, being a man who loved other men and had sex with them in this particular time period was a whole clusterfuck of an experience that i’m not doing justice if i don’t take it seriously and try to write him as a person in the les misérables time period rather than just take what people expect a gay man to look like and throw those character traits at him willy-nilly.

i also have to use my knowledge of human beings and the brick to write a combeferre that is believably a man who loves and has sex with other men. this means incorporating this where relevant into dialogue and exposition and potentially plot elements, and looking at his choices in the context of the story, and seeing how they line up with his choices in the brick (because fanfic!) and where they’re congruent, where they need work, and then just, to have a believable story at all, looking at the time and place and environment of my story and how complex it is! like, examining, where i need to describe things that would not be obvious to a modern audience, and where i need to flesh out character traits or perhaps use another character to highlight something that the pov character won’t, where i need to learn more about the average medical school sexy possibly-republican-but-you-don’t-know-yet-because-that’s-not-a-first-date-question dissection partner’s knowledge of light polarization circa 1829 in victor hugo’s fictionalization of paris, france

anyway i meant for this post to be like two paragraphs max. wish i could overshoot like this with fanfic. so, to recap, you can totally think that enjolras bleaches and dyes his naturally dark hair blonde and doesn’t own a clothing item in a color other than red, or that enjolras wants to be tied up upside-down with lace ribbons by grantaire who is wearing a chastity belt, or that courfeyrac is a flamboyant gay man with a glitter-covered apartment who doesn’t know what a clitoris is, for whatever reasons you have that i probably won’t understand, but for the love of god if you’re gonna write fic about those things either own that it’s self-indulgent and potentially out of character, or make me believe that the characters are behaving in these ways for reasons that align with their reasoning and motives in canon, because otherwise they’re.... not... recognizably the characters from canon and possibly your piece just isn’t very well written.

#*i have never seen a gay courfeyrac fic like this and something tells me i never will #*i'm not going to write it because my courfeyrac is straight myself

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