a rant about a NOTP

[alley_skywalker]

Frustrated rant of rage re: Marius/Cosette under the cut. (I don’t even dislike either of them. It’s just….aghhhhhhh….ok, ok, all bitching under the cut so no one has to see if they don’t want to bc I’m freaking annoyed and not censoring myself. You have been warned.)

 

JFC. It didn’t have to be like this. I had plenty of goodwill toward both of these characters. It could have been a perfectly nice, if unremarkable, plot B romance. But noooo I have to slog through pages and pages of this soap-opera BS. (And, btw, lol, no this isn’t about Eponine and Marius/Eponine.)

It’s just…this pairing…is the most boring part of this entire book. More boring than the convent digression. More than Waterloo and History of the Sewer combined. (Maybe not fair b/c I actually found the sewer history lesson morbidly fascinating if gross.) And not just boring – I can do boring – but fucking annoying. Not one iota of it feels realistic or even relateable in the way wish-fulfillment things can be even if unbelievable.

It reads less like a romance and more like Marius has mental health issues.

(Did they have a SINGLE conversation about ANYTHING substantive??)

(Does not help that I generally absolutely loath the trope of “I have found my romantic love. Now nothing else in the world has any real meaning.” Because romance is the most, if not only, meaning thing, right? Right? Christ. (At least the musical tries to mitigate somewhat with Empty Chairs? The book is just like lol who would waste time being sad about all their friends dying when they’ve got ROMANCE. Fucking shoot me.)

Not to mention that they both loose any real trace of personality they have as soon as they’re within interacting distance of each other. They interact less like people and more like two characters out of some sappy cooing pink princess fairy tale with an intended audience of children under 6. 

This doesn’t mean hate Cosette. *shrug* I do find her far less interesting then most other characters and she very often just feels like a doll, a plot devise, for other characters to adore and put on a pedestal. Which is annoying, but I’m willing to bet that’s Hugo’s sexism bleeding through. (19^th century, what ya gonna do). Anyway, I don’t dislike her. Nor do I really dislike Marius and if there is a part of his character I dislike it’s his obsession, sorry – twu wuv – for Cosette.

But this pairing, this goddamn pairing is one of the most laughably terrible romances I’ve read in a book that can claim to have any genuine quality. (Especially egregious in a book as this, which is otherwise excellent.)