Dross The Fish

Hello everyone!

This blog is mainly art and fandom focused and I am always looking for inspiration so feel free to send art requests or suggestions and I might draw you something nice. My ask box is always open.

Fair warning, if you have a blank blog and I'm unable to confirm you are human you run the risk of being blocked.

18+ side blog for sending your more nsfw asks and requests

Feed the fish please!: Ko-fi

AO3: Drossthefish

A Godless Adam. "Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel," Gave him the locket for extra drama.

There is no Angel of Music. "I'm a handsome fellow, eh, Christine?"

There is no Angel of Music. "I'm a handsome fellow, eh, Christine?"

Simply put: I think Victor is full of malarkey.

I feel like a few things could be going on here. 1. He's telling this story to Walton after his family has already died, he's got some serious grief googles on and there may be some desire for Walton to view Victor and his family favorably. 2. Victor has a strong, and to be quite honest well earned, bias against the Creature and the more saintly Victor makes his family look the worse the Creature comes off. I'm not saying Victor didn't love his family but that doesn't mean there was no toxicity there. I often wonder what we'd hear if the account was being told from the perspective of Ernest or Elizabeth because Victor is frequently shown through out the novel to either excessively idealize or excessively demonize.

We see his unreliability all the time with the Creature. He even ascribes supernatural abilities to his creation despite there being no textual evidence that the Creature has such powers and even when it's clear enough in the book that the Creature is leaving Victor food and provisions on their chase Victor insists it's a "good spirit" and at one point after the Creature outright tells Victor "I will be with you on your wedding night" Victor does a surprised pikachu face when Elizabeth is killed and goes "It was as if he blinded me to his intentions by magic!"

Victor, he told you. He told you in plain words to your face what his intentions were. He didn't obfuscate shit. You're just an idiot.

As Victor tells his story it becomes kind of apparent that while he's being truthful about the events he's not really an objective or entirely reliable narrator and that includes talking about his family.

Victor- "My mother was a saint and an angel! Gosh I love my fiance so much! She's also a saint and an angel!"

Also Victor- "So anyway I had a really disturbing nightmare that I was trying to kiss Elizabeth and she turned into this horrifying vision of my mother's rotting corpse."

Also Victor- "Btw if I create a new race of people they'll worship me as a god and love me and no one will ever be able to criticize me or my interests again."

Yeah...you don't have any issues at all, I'm sure you're the product of a great home life.

I haven't committed one way or the other. I never write with the intent for romance but if I like two characters together I may explore it.

XD I'm always happy to see Theo appreciation on my blog.

They are for now. We'll see how it goes.

I can agree with this. How good or bad the musical is really depends on who's playing the leads. Though I still feel more like as a musical it's bit like I'm listening to a concept album more than a polished story.

I feel like there's so much more to book Erik. The thing about the musical that kind of bugs me is that it cannot stand alone. It's counting on the audience to have some kind of familiarity with the source material and to let that prior knowledge fill in the blanks. My partner watched the Royal Albert Hall version with me and as someone who had zero familiarity with the story or characters beyond being aware they existed he was kind of lost at times and was legitimately confused about why Christine seemed to flip flop around her feelings for Erik and why Madam Giry seemed to know so much about Erik even so they never interacted. A lot of the ALW musical is banking that you either don't care about the details or you know the story already and are going to fill in those gaps yourself. Erik is no exception. We're not even given his name in the musical and his backstory is almost hand-waved. He kind of dumps all of his trauma and background onto Christine during the Final Lair scene where as before that she hadn't known him as anything but the Angel of Music and the Opera Ghost. Musical Erik....kind of doesn't exist and I don't know if we can even call him Erik. We get either the Angel of Music or the Phantom but the actual human part of him, the part that is "Erik" and "Longs to have a wife, and a flat, and to be like everyone else" is kind of reduced to a few lines here and there. His name is never once spoken and I sometimes wonder if that was intentionally done to make him seem more fantastical and less human. It's a little weird to me because the musical plays up the tension and chemistry between Erik and Christine so much but actually cuts down all of the moments that motivate Christine in the book to go back and sing for him one more time. The parts where he's apologizing, where he's remorseful or where he tries to be soft. In the book she remarks that he sang her to sleep. None of these exist in the ALW musical. Musical Erik doesn't actually have any moments where he shows her genuine kindness, just a sense of ownership and intense jealousy.

He is a sympathetic character. There are a lot of moments where I genuinely feel for him. Erik's scene with the Daroga is honestly such a key scene because it reveals so much about Erik's history and how his mind works. That's where we learn that he's genuinely haunted by the events of his life in Persia and when he says, rather ominously "No one can stop Erik, not even himself," you get a sense that he has some self awareness that he does horrible things and has a sense of regret. But he's also selfish, egotistical and lonely. He only knows one way to get what he wants and that's through violence and force. The scene with Erik holding Raoul and the Daroga in the torture chamber might make one think he's beyond saving given how little he cares about killing everyone and himself. And honestly that's part of why I don't like the romance angle with him and Christine. I think him letting her go and her forgiving him and acknowledging his humanity is stronger for not having them end up together. Because it's not just Christine seeing his humanity and reaching out, it's also him seeing hers. He lets her go because he sees her as more than the idea of a wife.

aaah thank you! I appreciate this.

Ehhh, not really. I liked both of those when I was a kid and the last time I revisited either them I was sharing them with my youngest sibling, there's a 20 year age gap between me and her so I shared a lot of things from my childhood, like Wishbone and Fraggle Rock, when she was still little. But for myself? I think I just outgrew it. Wishbone was great, it was very educational and a good introduction to classic literature. Fraggle Rock was also extremely well made and I think it's an very good show for younger children and similarly the Page Master is fine, but it's not amazing.

I have a few Edward/Henry is surprisingly neat and even, it looks a little different from how he'd normally write as Jekyll since he is left handed and Jekyll uses his non-dominant hand out of habit and because there was a stigma against left handedness back in the day while Hyde almost exclusively uses his left hand. Adam's handwriting is pretty plain and functional with a hard right slant. Sometimes when he writes the lines slope upward too. Watson, messy and rushed, he prefers to type. Quincey-neat and easily legible. Preference for cursive over print Larry-looks like hair someone pulled out of the bathtub drain. Theo-has a very fancy signature though her writing is kind of cramped and tiny. Selma-big loops and letters, tends to print rather than write in cursive. Erik-canonically has horrible handwriting, in the book it's compared to a child's.

Hrm, Adam doesn't pick his skin, he doesn't like to touch his skin much at all and had to get past hangups by mentally distancing himself from his body just to wash himself. Larry is the type to feel "itchy" and scratch at himself, usually around his neck. Edward grinds his teeth. Usually he has something in his mouth like an unlit cigar, a pipe or some other thing he can gnaw on while he stews or seethes. Erik is a tapper, he fidgets and drums his fingers or taps his foot in rhythm when he's impatient/anxious. Theo used to chew her hands and arms when she was in states of distress. Prior to becoming a vampire and getting fangs she would deal with her anxiety by biting or chewing her skin, at one point after realizing she'd caught tuberculosis it got so bad she had to wear gloves and long sleeves at all times to cover the bites.

No, a lot of us do create or interact with NSFW content but our relationship to it might be different from how allosexual people experience it. Even if I read or write smut I never imagine MYSELF in any of the scenarios and I typically have no interest in having any kind of sex IRL. Just in general, I have no interest in participating in stories, just reading them. I also think that in the right context sex and how a character engages with it can reveal things that might not be obvious in non-sexual situations. Sex is a large part of most people's lives, whether they have it, don't have it or don't want it. It's kind of in the same way that I don't enjoy or wish to play football and won't watch a football game on TV but could potentially enjoy a movie focused on a football team.

I don't think so? it is true that I am not moved by any sense of attraction to either character but sexual attraction doesn't really have anything to do with whether a romance makes a story compelling. I've read a few fics here and there that manage to make the pairing work. I just feel like most of the time the fics people plop in front of me are all determined to make this pairing work at the cost of Christine's character development and they really downplay Erik's instability and egoism. Like, they suck the fun out of both characters in favor of getting them to bump uglies. I want to see the characters meaningfully interacting in a way that is compelling and maybe even makes me reconsider the source material. I feel like that wouldn't change even if I was capable of being sexually attracted to either character. Like, where is the Christine that pitied Erik but still fought him every step of the way? That fought to protect Raoul and was ready to bash her own head in before marrying Erik? Christine is so feisty and stubborn. That character is infinitely more interesting and relatable than the simpering adoring fangirl pining for her "Angel of music," I kind of also don't like how much the fandom leans into her continuing to call Erik her Angel of Music after the reveal because that's not a thing she did. Once she found out he'd been lying to her she was pretty furious about it. The Angel of Music is something that connected her to her father. Erik used her grief and her desire to have some part of her father back to lure her in. I don't feel like she'd continue to want to call him that in light of how fucked up it was for him to do that. This doesn't mean she can't care for and pity Erik but I don't think she'd want to keep associating him with the memory of her father. I feel weirdly alone in this.

I don't know, maybe being ace makes me appreciate things about PoTO that I otherwise wouldn't if my primary interest was the romantic/sexual aspect but I don't think I'd be any less picky and critical of media in general, I'd just be picky and critical about the smut instead of indifferent to it.