Skip to main content

Featured

Two Essays on The Count of Monte Cristo

I love The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I have read the unabridged version more than once, and my most recent reread was in 2023. At that time, I wrote a couple of brief essays which I posted on Tumblr, one of which was about a canonically queer character and the other discussed a character who is often left out of the various adaptations. I present for you these essays with expansion and alteration, because I keep returning to them as pieces of writing and because I don't want them to be limited to those original posts. I'd like to thank longtime Patron Case Aiken, who receives a monthly shoutout, as well as new patrons DivineJasper and Sasha Khan. (Quotes are from Robin Buss’ English translation of Alexandre Dumas’ work.) Link to Audio Version. ----- Canonical Queerness in The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas You’d need to change surprisingly little of The Count of Monte Cristo to confirm Eugénie Danglars as a trans man (or a masc-leaning nonbinary person...
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

Megamorphs 3: Elfangor's Secret by K. A. Applegate

The Drode offers the Animorphs a chance to stop a Yeerk from changing history beyond recognition. They follow him through time, tracing hundreds of years of slaughter, sorrow, and gore. The tone swings between absurdity and horror.

All of the Animorphs react differently to the mission and to the cost proposed by the Drode. We see a stark example of how Cassie and Marco anticipate Jake's thinking, but in different ways. Because it switches frequently between perspectives we get the chance to see different reactions to nearly the same event. I appreciate how each of them has different ways of processing similar information, and also how they each pick up on different things around them. This book does a lot to develop Cassie, Marco, and Ax, in particular, as they tend to be more difficult to read in books which they do not narrate. Cassie is still dealing with events in The Departure, clearly not feeling absolved by her later actions in The Sickness. "Cassie, the killer with a conscience. Kill 'em, then cry over 'em."

The Animorphs (Jake, Marco, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, and Aximili) stand together

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts