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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...
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Ship of Smoke and Steel by Django Wexler (The Wells of Sorcery, #1)

I did not finish Ship of Smoke and Steel, I got 110 pages in and had to stop because I had a weird mix between apathy and dread every time I thought about it. This one just never gripped me, I think I had trouble relating to a MC who treats allies as so completely disposable. If they’re not going to care about the secondary characters, why should I? Even this early on there is a hint of possible queer romance that will develop later on in the book, but since the protagonist has already demonstrated that they are completely capable of murdering men they've been in relationships with, being offered a f/f pairing doesn't sit right with me. As a bi person, having a character who seems to be written as bi or pan also be a character willing to murder their partners is really unsettling because it plays into biphobic stereotypes. If the book handles it by making her have been lesbian and not really bi or pan... that would make it worse, not better because it would play off of a different facet of biphobia. I didn't get far enough to know which way it was going to go, but I got far enough to know that I wouldn't be comfortable with either solution.

CW for discussion of sex trafficking, discussion of child abuse, homophobia, ableism, ableist slurs, gore, violence, major character death.

A young woman stands in a cloud of smoke holding two glowing swords.


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