OOC: Infopost - The Abridged Edition
Abridged, but still kind of wordy, because it's me. Look, I honestly hadn't planned on apping this girl. It just happened. I'm probably more surprised than some of you.
This is Éponine Thénardier, from Les Misérables, and she'll be arriving soonish. To be clear about one thing right off she's from the Victor Hugo novel, not the Claude-Michel Schönberg/Alain Boublil musical based on the book. In some ways they're almost completely different characters. I'm still using screencaps from the movie musical for my PB because I enjoy looking at Samantha Barks. (Me:Samantha Barks::Katie:Jeremy Renner.) Though seriously, she did an amazing job of blending in a whole lot of book characterization. ANYWAY.
Oh, and there are gifs. Because I ACTUALLY HAVE A PB THAT PEOPLE MAKE GIFS FOR, FINALLY. (Shut up, this is new and very exciting for me.)
The Canon, (Hopefully) In a Nutshell
And here's where I try to sum up 1900 pages of 19th-century prose as concisely as possible, so basically, for every one sentence of this section pretend there are ten more explaining in depth, giving backstory on incidental characters, going off on a tangent, or getting philosophical about something that hasn't come up in the narrative yet. If you're familiar with the musical you know the gist of the story. Pro tip: don't ask me about the differences between the book and the musical. I'll never stop talking.
In 1845, Victor Hugo, drawing on his own experiences of life in Paris, particularly the 1832 June Rebellion, started writing a novel titled Misères that got put aside for years and was eventually completed and published in 1862 as Les Misérables. The title's a bit wonky: while it can be literally translated as "the miserable ones," Hugo uses it to refer to the destitute, the underdogs, the outcasts, and the rebels of society -- to wit, most of the five billion characters in the book. Okay, not that many but still, a lot. There are reasons this fandom refers to the novel as "the Brick." I'm pretty sure you could kill someone with the paperback. It's more a long, eloquent treatise on Hugo's views of politics, religion, and society that just happens to have a story in it than it is narrative fiction: Hugo will go off for chapters and chapters at a time about the backstory of a character or a town or a period of history that happens to be relevant to whatever's going on in the story at the moment. (I learned more about the Paris sewer system than I ever needed to know. Ever ever ever.) Whatever, it's still been my favorite book since I was twelve. I snark because I love.
Anyway, the story in brief. In 1795 Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread, gets arrested, ends up spending 19 years in prison (5 plus 14 for escape attempts) as prisoner 24601. In 1815 he's released and finds out that it actually blows because nobody trusts an ex-convict. He steals a bishop's silver, has a giant crisis of conscience when the bishop tells the police he actually gave the silver to Valjean, and (after a couple of slip-ups) gets to use it to get back on his feet.
But breaks parole to do it. That kind of complicates things.
Under an assumed name he ends up in Montreuil-sur-Mer where, thanks to some clever ideas that rejuvenated the jewelry-making industry there, people like him enough to make him the mayor. Circa 1823, Valjean is a Very Nice Guy now. Too nice, if you ask Inspector Javert, who is cool with him giving money to the poor and all but doesn't take too kindly to Valjean interceding on behalf of a prostitute he was trying to arrest. So Javert goes all "you are INTERFERING WITH JUSTICE, OMG HDU" and tries to rat him out to the prefecture of police as an escaped convict. Except whoops, the prefecture tells him "Nope, sorry, we actually caught that guy, ha ha be faster next time," and Javert, being Javert, immediately goes to Valjean all "Um, my bad, you need to have me fired for this now." Then naturally Valjean, being Valjean, decides he can't let an innocent guy who just happens to look like him go to jail, and goes and turns himself in.
SLIGHT FLAW IN THIS PLAN: he'd promised to make sure the daughter of Fantine, the aforementioned prostitute (who got fired from his factory for having said illegitimate child, not that he had anything to do with it, then died of some unnamed illness aggravated by having a snowball shoved down her back) was taken care of. Oops. Hard to do that when he gets dragged back to jail. And escapes again. As you do, because he didn't have enough problems as it was, but he was successful this time. Right, about Fantine's daughter Cosette. She's been living at an inn with a pair of con artists who've been milking Fantine for money by claiming Cosette needs new clothes or medical care or what have you. Not so much, but they are treating her horribly and making her do all the chores while they use Fantine's money to buy things for their two daughters. Valjean basically buys Cosette off them, and when they realize this means they can't use her as a steady source of income any more they resent this forever.
So Valjean adopts Cosette and takes her to live in Paris, and EVERYBODY ELSE ENDS UP THERE TOO, including Javert, who doesn't want to drop the whole escaped-convict thing, except it's hard to find someone who lives like a hermit, never lets his adopted daughter get out of the house except when he's with her, and never explains to her why he's such a paranoid bastard. This is so healthy, really; I think Valjean might rival Han and Leia Solo for questionable parenting. Also the Thénardiers, who are still holding that grudge about Cosette, just happen to have moved into Valjean's old apartment.
And then we stop paying attention to Valjean for a while in favor of getting to know a bunch of college boys. Unfortunately the one we get to learn the most about, Marius Pontmercy, is a pompous space cadet who is really too emo to live. His friends, who are awesome and bantery and smartass-y and bromance-y all over the place, are kind of plotting a new revolution. His neighbors just happen to be the former innkeepers who were 'taking care of' Cosette, on whom he just happens to develop a giant schoolboy crush. All kinds of circumstances culminate in all the major characters and most of the surviving minor ones getting caught up in the June Rebellion of 1832, somehow or other. Shit gets stacked up in the streets to build barricades, the National Guard is displeased, and rocks fall, everybody dies except Marius and Cosette because life isn't fair and Valjean because he can't die until the end of the book. A few other people get to live, too, but we don't really care about them.
The book is a lot more serious than I just made it sound. Promise. It's very, very long, but there is some seriously gorgeous prose in there.
About Éponine
I could care less whether you use the accents, personally; I just take a bizarre nerdy pleasure in using Alt-keystroke combinations. "Thénardier" is pronounced "TEH-nahr-dyer," which is some godawful ad hoc pronunciation respelling but you hopefully get the idea.
The oldest child of the innkeepers who used Cosette to scam Fantine, Éponine's the one most people with a passing familiarity with the story know of as the poor unlucky street girl who fell in love with Marius, who never noticed because he was way too into Cosette, and died in his arms at the barricade. Yeah, yeah, it's all very tragic and sweet and part of the story and she got shot saving his life and all, but it's not the interesting part. The important thing here is that she's a thief, the daughter of a criminal, and a scheming little shit. And that's why I love her. She plays messenger for her father and his gang of criminals and occasionally cases the joint in advance for them, she's good at following people, she has a teenage assassin for a fuckbuddy. Between Montparnasse and her thing for Marius, I think I have a justifiable working hypothesis that she has terrible taste in men.
Which is not to say there's no reason to feel sorry for her. Her mother is scary when pissed off -- seriously, she threw a large chunk of rock at Javert's head -- and her father is not only physically abusive as well but has zero compunction about pimping her and her sister Azelma out every now and then. (Cosette used to bear the brunt of all the mistreatment, but once she was gone, it was open season on the Thénardier kids.) Her little brother Gavroche is seriously better off fending for himself on the streets than he would be living with them . . . not that he would. His mother threw him out because she has zero interest in having sons. This is also why, when a family friend whose income came from tapping Marius's grandfather (how is everyone this interconnected, seriously?) for child support ran into a minor snag when her actual (allegedly his) boys died of some sickness, she was happy to offload two more sons. Éponine, Azelma, and Gavroche are sort of vaguely aware they exist, but that's about all. This family is lovely, I swear. I understand why they did it, but if there's anything I dislike about the musical it was relegating the Thénardiers to being the comic relief.
Still, Gavroche is the awesomest street urchin to have ever awesomed. Ever. I will fight you on this. He lives in an elephant, occasionally hooks his sister up with theater tickets because he hangs out with actors, and is a total smartass; your argument is invalid.
Okay, back to Éponine, WTF does her username mean? I've got the passage quoted in her user profile, but in brief, when her father calls her a bitch she replies that she's not a dog's daughter, but a wolf's. ("Je ne suis pas la fille au chien, puisque je suis la fille au loup.") I love that comeback, so really, I had to.
Okay: a brief and partially appropriated from my app rundown on her appearance, because as good a job as she did with the role, honestly, Samantha Barks is so adorable it hurts prettier than Éponine ought to be. This icon probably comes the closest to matching up any of the book descriptions: hair in horrible shape, a dull and glassy stare, and a tendency to let her mouth hang halfway open which is not terribly flattering to her several missing teeth. She's kind of tallish at about 5'8", but thin to the point of emaciated due to starvation. Also, unlike my PB, she does not have an amazing voice. She sounds more like an 18-year-old female version of Marlon Brando, in that drinking-too-much-cheap-booze way, so although she does have a habit of wandering around at night and occasionally breaking out into little snippets of song, it's not going to sound like this. Yes, that was a totally gratuitous excuse to link to a clip from the movie. What? While she's not (according to the standards of her time, anyway) attractive at all you can tell that she was pretty once, before her life went to shit, and she still looks it in a strange, tragic sort of way. (Don't look at me. Victor Hugo has a thing about suffering making people beautiful.) This is subject to improvement over time, but for now at least, basically, she looks like thrice-reheated hell.
Also, she will talk to herself, and she might be a tiny bit crazy due to repeated bouts of starvation messing with her head. She can get talkative, because that's apparently a requirement for all my female characters, but she will interrupt herself mid-sentence and go off on tangents, especially if the conversation's trending toward something she doesn't want to talk about. You know. Like her crappy-ass family.
Speaking of which, she's trying to be better and distance herself a little bit from their criminal shenanigans, but this is the thing: she's still looking out for herself first and foremost, because that's how she knows how to survive. If she offers to do something for you, she's most likely planning on collecting a favor in exchange later -- if she doesn't ask for it right away. Yes, this is the girl who kept her father's gang from robbing Valjean's house, then warned Valjean to move out. But this is also the girl who deliberately intercepted Cosette's letter to Marius so he wouldn't know where she'd disappeared to, because she was counting on him having a massive emo fit of despair that would drive him to the barricades. This is also the girl who deliberately went there herself, fully aware that everyone was going to get killed.
So yeah. She's a little bit messed up, and she sort of tried to kill herself. This is not something that will come up in casual threads, nor is it anything I'm going to spring on anyone without warning. It's not like Éponine trusts people, particularly strangers, enough to go off at them about her personal life anyway.
(Sidebar, because I can never not rant about this. So you not only make sure to sit on the same park bench every day for months just to see some girl come by on daily walks with her father, and then spy on your neighbors through a hole in the wall because her father's supposed to show up there and you're hoping she'll tag along, you ask a girl you know is tangled up with a bunch of criminals to follow her and find her address for you? WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU, MARIUS PONTMERCY? THAT IS SOME SERIOUS CREEPER BEHAVIOR.)
Where in canon is she coming from? Just after the fight at the barricade, which she's actually going to survive. Normally I hate "everybody lives" fix-it fic in this canon, but you know what, there are approximately four prominent female characters in this behemoth of a novel, and three of them die, and I'm allergic to women in refrigerators.
So this isn't happening. (Gratuitous video linking excuse number 2. I'm done now, promise.)
Éponine, the Post Office, and You
So, what's she going to be doing in town, anyway? The same sort of thing she used to do in early 19th-century Paris: delivering mail. She'll just be doing it with 90% less shadiness and 100% more legitimate-employment-ness, since she'll be working for the post office. But wait, didn't she try to keep Cosette's letter from getting to Marius? Yeah. If you need your mail messed with for plotty purposes (intercepted, sent to the wrong place, etc.) hit me up OOCly and I'll see what I can do to have this girl make it happen. If you need her to mess with someone else's mail for plotty purposes, that can be done too as long as all involved players give the go-ahead.
She's also available to make special deliveries on request -- standard postal ones, or, uh, via unofficial means if you pay her under the table, if you need that. Ahem.
Plus hey, if you need to get your pocket picked for whatever reason, or want someone followed for whatever reason, she can do that too. Not that those have a thing to do with the post office. They're just things she does.
(I considered the flower shop for about a minute, because I thought it was funny, and then I got wibbly, so no.)
And in conclusion, have some gifs of Sam Barks being adorkable.
Comments, questions (I'm sure I forgot to mention something), gif party?
This is Éponine Thénardier, from Les Misérables, and she'll be arriving soonish. To be clear about one thing right off she's from the Victor Hugo novel, not the Claude-Michel Schönberg/Alain Boublil musical based on the book. In some ways they're almost completely different characters. I'm still using screencaps from the movie musical for my PB because I enjoy looking at Samantha Barks. (Me:Samantha Barks::Katie:Jeremy Renner.) Though seriously, she did an amazing job of blending in a whole lot of book characterization. ANYWAY.
Oh, and there are gifs. Because I ACTUALLY HAVE A PB THAT PEOPLE MAKE GIFS FOR, FINALLY. (Shut up, this is new and very exciting for me.)
The Canon, (Hopefully) In a Nutshell
And here's where I try to sum up 1900 pages of 19th-century prose as concisely as possible, so basically, for every one sentence of this section pretend there are ten more explaining in depth, giving backstory on incidental characters, going off on a tangent, or getting philosophical about something that hasn't come up in the narrative yet. If you're familiar with the musical you know the gist of the story. Pro tip: don't ask me about the differences between the book and the musical. I'll never stop talking.
In 1845, Victor Hugo, drawing on his own experiences of life in Paris, particularly the 1832 June Rebellion, started writing a novel titled Misères that got put aside for years and was eventually completed and published in 1862 as Les Misérables. The title's a bit wonky: while it can be literally translated as "the miserable ones," Hugo uses it to refer to the destitute, the underdogs, the outcasts, and the rebels of society -- to wit, most of the five billion characters in the book. Okay, not that many but still, a lot. There are reasons this fandom refers to the novel as "the Brick." I'm pretty sure you could kill someone with the paperback. It's more a long, eloquent treatise on Hugo's views of politics, religion, and society that just happens to have a story in it than it is narrative fiction: Hugo will go off for chapters and chapters at a time about the backstory of a character or a town or a period of history that happens to be relevant to whatever's going on in the story at the moment. (I learned more about the Paris sewer system than I ever needed to know. Ever ever ever.) Whatever, it's still been my favorite book since I was twelve. I snark because I love.
Anyway, the story in brief. In 1795 Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread, gets arrested, ends up spending 19 years in prison (5 plus 14 for escape attempts) as prisoner 24601. In 1815 he's released and finds out that it actually blows because nobody trusts an ex-convict. He steals a bishop's silver, has a giant crisis of conscience when the bishop tells the police he actually gave the silver to Valjean, and (after a couple of slip-ups) gets to use it to get back on his feet.
But breaks parole to do it. That kind of complicates things.
Under an assumed name he ends up in Montreuil-sur-Mer where, thanks to some clever ideas that rejuvenated the jewelry-making industry there, people like him enough to make him the mayor. Circa 1823, Valjean is a Very Nice Guy now. Too nice, if you ask Inspector Javert, who is cool with him giving money to the poor and all but doesn't take too kindly to Valjean interceding on behalf of a prostitute he was trying to arrest. So Javert goes all "you are INTERFERING WITH JUSTICE, OMG HDU" and tries to rat him out to the prefecture of police as an escaped convict. Except whoops, the prefecture tells him "Nope, sorry, we actually caught that guy, ha ha be faster next time," and Javert, being Javert, immediately goes to Valjean all "Um, my bad, you need to have me fired for this now." Then naturally Valjean, being Valjean, decides he can't let an innocent guy who just happens to look like him go to jail, and goes and turns himself in.
SLIGHT FLAW IN THIS PLAN: he'd promised to make sure the daughter of Fantine, the aforementioned prostitute (who got fired from his factory for having said illegitimate child, not that he had anything to do with it, then died of some unnamed illness aggravated by having a snowball shoved down her back) was taken care of. Oops. Hard to do that when he gets dragged back to jail. And escapes again. As you do, because he didn't have enough problems as it was, but he was successful this time. Right, about Fantine's daughter Cosette. She's been living at an inn with a pair of con artists who've been milking Fantine for money by claiming Cosette needs new clothes or medical care or what have you. Not so much, but they are treating her horribly and making her do all the chores while they use Fantine's money to buy things for their two daughters. Valjean basically buys Cosette off them, and when they realize this means they can't use her as a steady source of income any more they resent this forever.
So Valjean adopts Cosette and takes her to live in Paris, and EVERYBODY ELSE ENDS UP THERE TOO, including Javert, who doesn't want to drop the whole escaped-convict thing, except it's hard to find someone who lives like a hermit, never lets his adopted daughter get out of the house except when he's with her, and never explains to her why he's such a paranoid bastard. This is so healthy, really; I think Valjean might rival Han and Leia Solo for questionable parenting. Also the Thénardiers, who are still holding that grudge about Cosette, just happen to have moved into Valjean's old apartment.
And then we stop paying attention to Valjean for a while in favor of getting to know a bunch of college boys. Unfortunately the one we get to learn the most about, Marius Pontmercy, is a pompous space cadet who is really too emo to live. His friends, who are awesome and bantery and smartass-y and bromance-y all over the place, are kind of plotting a new revolution. His neighbors just happen to be the former innkeepers who were 'taking care of' Cosette, on whom he just happens to develop a giant schoolboy crush. All kinds of circumstances culminate in all the major characters and most of the surviving minor ones getting caught up in the June Rebellion of 1832, somehow or other. Shit gets stacked up in the streets to build barricades, the National Guard is displeased, and rocks fall, everybody dies except Marius and Cosette because life isn't fair and Valjean because he can't die until the end of the book. A few other people get to live, too, but we don't really care about them.
The book is a lot more serious than I just made it sound. Promise. It's very, very long, but there is some seriously gorgeous prose in there.
About Éponine
I could care less whether you use the accents, personally; I just take a bizarre nerdy pleasure in using Alt-keystroke combinations. "Thénardier" is pronounced "TEH-nahr-dyer," which is some godawful ad hoc pronunciation respelling but you hopefully get the idea.
The oldest child of the innkeepers who used Cosette to scam Fantine, Éponine's the one most people with a passing familiarity with the story know of as the poor unlucky street girl who fell in love with Marius, who never noticed because he was way too into Cosette, and died in his arms at the barricade. Yeah, yeah, it's all very tragic and sweet and part of the story and she got shot saving his life and all, but it's not the interesting part. The important thing here is that she's a thief, the daughter of a criminal, and a scheming little shit. And that's why I love her. She plays messenger for her father and his gang of criminals and occasionally cases the joint in advance for them, she's good at following people, she has a teenage assassin for a fuckbuddy. Between Montparnasse and her thing for Marius, I think I have a justifiable working hypothesis that she has terrible taste in men.
Which is not to say there's no reason to feel sorry for her. Her mother is scary when pissed off -- seriously, she threw a large chunk of rock at Javert's head -- and her father is not only physically abusive as well but has zero compunction about pimping her and her sister Azelma out every now and then. (Cosette used to bear the brunt of all the mistreatment, but once she was gone, it was open season on the Thénardier kids.) Her little brother Gavroche is seriously better off fending for himself on the streets than he would be living with them . . . not that he would. His mother threw him out because she has zero interest in having sons. This is also why, when a family friend whose income came from tapping Marius's grandfather (how is everyone this interconnected, seriously?) for child support ran into a minor snag when her actual (allegedly his) boys died of some sickness, she was happy to offload two more sons. Éponine, Azelma, and Gavroche are sort of vaguely aware they exist, but that's about all. This family is lovely, I swear. I understand why they did it, but if there's anything I dislike about the musical it was relegating the Thénardiers to being the comic relief.
Still, Gavroche is the awesomest street urchin to have ever awesomed. Ever. I will fight you on this. He lives in an elephant, occasionally hooks his sister up with theater tickets because he hangs out with actors, and is a total smartass; your argument is invalid.
Okay, back to Éponine, WTF does her username mean? I've got the passage quoted in her user profile, but in brief, when her father calls her a bitch she replies that she's not a dog's daughter, but a wolf's. ("Je ne suis pas la fille au chien, puisque je suis la fille au loup.") I love that comeback, so really, I had to.
Okay: a brief and partially appropriated from my app rundown on her appearance, because as good a job as she did with the role, honestly, Samantha Barks is so adorable it hurts prettier than Éponine ought to be. This icon probably comes the closest to matching up any of the book descriptions: hair in horrible shape, a dull and glassy stare, and a tendency to let her mouth hang halfway open which is not terribly flattering to her several missing teeth. She's kind of tallish at about 5'8", but thin to the point of emaciated due to starvation. Also, unlike my PB, she does not have an amazing voice. She sounds more like an 18-year-old female version of Marlon Brando, in that drinking-too-much-cheap-booze way, so although she does have a habit of wandering around at night and occasionally breaking out into little snippets of song, it's not going to sound like this. Yes, that was a totally gratuitous excuse to link to a clip from the movie. What? While she's not (according to the standards of her time, anyway) attractive at all you can tell that she was pretty once, before her life went to shit, and she still looks it in a strange, tragic sort of way. (Don't look at me. Victor Hugo has a thing about suffering making people beautiful.) This is subject to improvement over time, but for now at least, basically, she looks like thrice-reheated hell.
Also, she will talk to herself, and she might be a tiny bit crazy due to repeated bouts of starvation messing with her head. She can get talkative, because that's apparently a requirement for all my female characters, but she will interrupt herself mid-sentence and go off on tangents, especially if the conversation's trending toward something she doesn't want to talk about. You know. Like her crappy-ass family.
Speaking of which, she's trying to be better and distance herself a little bit from their criminal shenanigans, but this is the thing: she's still looking out for herself first and foremost, because that's how she knows how to survive. If she offers to do something for you, she's most likely planning on collecting a favor in exchange later -- if she doesn't ask for it right away. Yes, this is the girl who kept her father's gang from robbing Valjean's house, then warned Valjean to move out. But this is also the girl who deliberately intercepted Cosette's letter to Marius so he wouldn't know where she'd disappeared to, because she was counting on him having a massive emo fit of despair that would drive him to the barricades. This is also the girl who deliberately went there herself, fully aware that everyone was going to get killed.
So yeah. She's a little bit messed up, and she sort of tried to kill herself. This is not something that will come up in casual threads, nor is it anything I'm going to spring on anyone without warning. It's not like Éponine trusts people, particularly strangers, enough to go off at them about her personal life anyway.
(Sidebar, because I can never not rant about this. So you not only make sure to sit on the same park bench every day for months just to see some girl come by on daily walks with her father, and then spy on your neighbors through a hole in the wall because her father's supposed to show up there and you're hoping she'll tag along, you ask a girl you know is tangled up with a bunch of criminals to follow her and find her address for you? WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU, MARIUS PONTMERCY? THAT IS SOME SERIOUS CREEPER BEHAVIOR.)
Where in canon is she coming from? Just after the fight at the barricade, which she's actually going to survive. Normally I hate "everybody lives" fix-it fic in this canon, but you know what, there are approximately four prominent female characters in this behemoth of a novel, and three of them die, and I'm allergic to women in refrigerators.
So this isn't happening. (Gratuitous video linking excuse number 2. I'm done now, promise.)
Éponine, the Post Office, and You
So, what's she going to be doing in town, anyway? The same sort of thing she used to do in early 19th-century Paris: delivering mail. She'll just be doing it with 90% less shadiness and 100% more legitimate-employment-ness, since she'll be working for the post office. But wait, didn't she try to keep Cosette's letter from getting to Marius? Yeah. If you need your mail messed with for plotty purposes (intercepted, sent to the wrong place, etc.) hit me up OOCly and I'll see what I can do to have this girl make it happen. If you need her to mess with someone else's mail for plotty purposes, that can be done too as long as all involved players give the go-ahead.
She's also available to make special deliveries on request -- standard postal ones, or, uh, via unofficial means if you pay her under the table, if you need that. Ahem.
Plus hey, if you need to get your pocket picked for whatever reason, or want someone followed for whatever reason, she can do that too. Not that those have a thing to do with the post office. They're just things she does.
(I considered the flower shop for about a minute, because I thought it was funny, and then I got wibbly, so no.)
And in conclusion, have some gifs of Sam Barks being adorkable.
Comments, questions (I'm sure I forgot to mention something), gif party?