had a fascinating english class that resulted in the notes header “the forcefeminization of victor frankenstein”
what the people want, the people get
you see
my professor’s take is that mary shelley is feminizing victor throughout the novel, as a way of flipping gender roles and putting a male character through female experiences.
evidence as explained:
victor is creating life. he is putting his health at risk (spends two years with little sleep or socialization) to bring life forth into this world
his illness after he is shocked by the creature coming to life is akin to both ‘hysteria’ and postpartum depression
he pretty much swoons, let’s be honest
henry clerval, a man who has been characterized as manly and heroic, has to chase after damsel-in-distress victor and care for him as he convalesces
afterward, he hides what he did and went through, for fear that others will label him crazy and emotional and not believe him. sound familiar?
Victor in general is more emotional than the other characters and is constantly tempering his reactions to not be seen as irrational
the book does not otherwise have central female characters
Also, Shelley’s mother died in childbirth. It’s interesting, then, that Shelley presents the creation of life as something horrific and damaging. She parallels Victor with her mother.
in conclusion, Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is one of the first examples of mpreg in English literature
my corner store guy is a 50 year old man who’s my best friend in the world and recently he was like “you’re too pretty to be single I have some nephews you should meet. very handsome!” and I was like “a niece might be more up my alley” and he just got more excited and said “ah even better! I was overselling my nephews but my nieces are very beautiful”
The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.
I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.
Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!
But let me tell you a story:
I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.
One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.
At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.
I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.
Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.
The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.
And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.
So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.
So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.
By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.
Almost. Years ago my computer suddenly stopped working and lost everything on it. Fortunately a relatively recent backup still existed bc of my family, a recent parts switch, and dumb luck. But last year a friend of mine got hacked and lost close to everything he had done creatively in the last 17-ish years. Art. Novels in progress. Entire conlangs. DnD character Sheets. Music he had made. All gone. He never backed any of it up. Few months later I started this habit (or ritual, almost) of drawing a reminder beast any time I would make a full complete backup. In hopes that seeing these things might remind others and myself. (Another factor here is that I am an animator and some of the stuff on my computer took literal years to make. And the film university I go to urges us to take this stuff seriously, too.)
There’s an old saying in the computer world.
There are two kinds of people
Those who have lost everything because of a drive failure
And those that are GOING TO lose everything because of a drive failure
That is why you back up your stuff. It isn’t if, it’s when. If it isn’t drive failure, it’s going to be malware, or ransomeware, or a battery that fails and destroys your laptop, or a lightning strike that destroys your system, or a house fire/flood/earthquake, or simple theft of your device, the list is as long as your arm. Someday you WILL have a problem that eats all of your data. Then the only thing that will save your a** will be backups. Personally I have three levels; TimeMachine, back up to the cloud, and a drive that I back everything up to once a month and keep in the fireproof safe.
