i fucking love Les Mis

javert's suicide / david thaxton, 17 march 2023

i had to share this truly balls-to-the-wall rendition of javert's suicide. yes those howling/grunting noises are thaxton. he performed the whole thing swaying from side to side, sobbing. genuinely not a clue what was happening here

ok, little rant about a use of a leitmotif in les mis that i think has slipped under most people's radars!

so you the know the police leitmotif? the "tell me quickly what's the story/who saw what and why and where/let him give a full description/let him answer to javert!" tune that appears whenever somebody gets arrested?

now turn your ear to javert's suicide, specifically the "i am reaching but i fall/and the stars are black and cold" part. it took me a while to notice, but this whole section of the song is just a snippet of the arrest leitmotif:

but he never completes it. the snippet repeats and repeats. try as he might, he finds himself unable to sing the same old song of Justice and Law and Righteousness and Order. he's like a jammed cassette player spitting out the same second of music over and over and over and over again, unable to follow his old ways, but unable to let them go. he's stuck, but he will keep throwing himself against the walls of the cage.

javert is desperately trying to run on his old tracks of thought, but, as vicky h puts it, he experiences "the derailment of a soul, the shattering of an integrity irresistibly propelled in a straight line and dashed against God".

: )

Not enough people talk about the frankly insane word choices in Volume 2 when Javert is chasing Valjean near Petit-Picpus.

I can't tell if it's just the Finnish translation being weird or if this scene just has psychosexual undertones. Like Javert is described as "toying with his prey", he has "a moment of hellish pleasure", he's so happy he indulges in some snuff, he "swallows [Valjean] with his gaze", and one sentence is literally just "Javert enjoyed [this]." They also use the word "arouse" and an adjective I've never seen used outside a sexual context (it translates to something like licentious or orgiastic).

I need some French or English readers to pitch in. Is the scene always this homoerotic or did the Finnish translator just go wild?

ill just leave this here

Crucial update: I didn't go back to the beginning of the blog, but I did scroll back through several months of poll, and this is the largest discrepancy in either direction of any poll I encountered.

I'm sorry but i just noticed this comment

ID tags reading: if pursues your orgasm like he hunted the protag you're gonna do fine / end ID

... So he's gonna take nearly 20 years, lose track of what he's doing completely several times, and ultimately have a personal crisis about it and leave Very Finally rather than finish the job???

"i will never rest, till then..."

Motherfucker probably spends all his free time trying to catch a bread thief

devastating! local man is wrong and always has been wrong!

a little javert sketch for the barricade day

What does Javert hate the most you ask? A single mum who works two jobs, who loves her kids and never stops, with gentle hands and the heart of a fighter

Quick! Funniest reason for someone to become a villain

Has a crush on the hero and can't be normal about it

Feeling normal about Javert and Eponine today

Javert is a complex character with many layers and none of them are very good. He contains multitudes and they all kind of suck

and they were lawyers

To expand on my thoughts on how I think they write letters to each other

Happy “introduction of literature’s most problematic furry” day to those who celebrate!