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cactusnymph · 9 months

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the right ingredients

Even when he was a child himself Gale was never good at dealing with other children. Burying himself in books all day and using the biggest words he could find to sound impressive and to be as precise as he could never really resonated with most other children—or adults, for that matter.

So when Tav walks over with a child in tow as he carefully cuts some onions for tonight’s dinner, Gale is wary. She is scrawny, with a mop of red hair and two differently colored eyes. The most important thing about her is the fat, fluffy cat at her side, staring at him with huge eyes as if he might throw it in the soup at any second.

“Gale, this is Yenna. She’s staying with us for a while. I thought she could help you cook?”, Tav says with a smile. Gale wishes that smile wouldn’t turn his brain into something that feels much like the bubbling soup in the cauldron looks. He clears his throat.

“Uh—“, he starts, unsure of what he wants to say. The child looks so big-eyed that Gale is afraid she might start crying at any second and that would most likely be even worse than having her cut some carrots. “Have you ever cooked before?”

She shuffles and nods.

“Yes, I’m real good at it! I can make all kinds of stuff. Porridge and omelets and squash soup and—“

As Yenna continues to list a total of eleven dishes she can cook, Tav rustles her hair with a soft look on their face that makes Gale’s insides tingle. Oh, he wishes he didn’t feel the unnecessary pang of jealousy just because he wants them to touch his hair and smile at him the same way. Emotions are to terribly silly.

Gale coughs.

“Well, that sounds very impressive indeed. Yenna, was it? I suppose I can make way for an assistant. Usually I don’t allow others to interfere in my nightly cooking, but! Since our fearless leader recommended your prowess I shall—“

He stops himself as Tav looks at him with an amused smile.

“Right”, he says, catching himself. “How about you peel some of those potatoes over there?”

“Yes! I can do that, sir!”

“Mind me sitting here while you work?”, Tav asks, their head tipped in Gale’s direction. Once again he marvels at the fact that he never really spent much time with anyone, let alone a Tiefling. Tav’s dark blue skin is not unlike the nightsky, especially with the white freckles covering their entire face and their muscular arms. Gale would like to pretend that he does not spend innumerable minutes of every single day staring at their biceps. But he would be lying to himself, of course.

He allows himself to follow the curvature of their horns and gaze at their glowing white eyes before turning to Yenna.

“So, I see you have a cat companion! As do I. What’s their name?”

“This is Grub”, Yenna says, her tongue sticking out between her lips as she peels a large potato that looks even bigger in her tiny hands. “He’s shy. What’s your cat’s name?”

Gale carefully dumps some sliced onions into the bubbling liquid.

“Her name is Tara. She’s been my companion for a long time and I miss her dearly.”

Yenna smiles at him. She has a front tooth missing.

“Do you also have a cat?”, she asks Tav who is casually chewing on a piece of carrot.

“No, I don’t. Always wanted one, but my pops was allergic”, Tav says with a rueful sigh. Gale notices that their eyes linger on Grub but they keep their respectful distance. Considering Tav’s habit of speaking to every single animal they come across Gale can imagine that they asked permission to pet Grub—and were denied.

Yenna is quiet for a while as she peels potatoes and Gale does his best not to comment on the uneven peeling. He can imagine that Tav would not appreciate him reprimanding a child for less than optimal peeling techniques.

Usually Gale doesn’t allow anyone else to intrude on his cooking, but he has to admit that it’s not too bad to keep his territorial habits in check for a bit, if just to bask in the delightful companionship of Tav. And even though Gale usually doesn’t deal well with children, Yenna doesn’t seem to mind his presence or the way he speaks.

She asks for the meaning of every ‘big’ word that he uses and listens intently as he explains and Tav watches the two of them with a glint in their white eyes.

“This smells so good already”, Yenna sighs and sniffs the air with her eyes closed. “Can I stir it?”

“Certainly”, Gale allows and Yenna grabs the big wooden spoon excitedly before dunking it into the soup. Gale doesn’t cringe. He doesn’t. This is a child in distress that deserves every piece of distraction she can get. Gale can let her stir his soup even though she stirs it as if the spoon is running away from a goblin horde.

“Maybe in the morning you could teach me how to make a proper omelet”, Gale says and Yenna almost drops the spoon into the soup.

“Really?”, she says, her eyes impossibly big. It makes Gale’s heart melt. He might not be well equipped to deal with children but their joy is something precious to behold.

“Absolutely! One should never stop to acquire new skills and knowledge”, Gale says with a nod and a little bow that makes Yenna giggle. Finally, she hands him back the spoon and sits cross-legged on the floor next to the fire as she watches him season their dinner, asking about every single herb he adds to the cauldron.

It takes him a while to notice Tav looking at him with a soft expression on their face.

“Now why are you looking at me like that?”, he can’t help but ask. Tav laughs quietly and shrugs.

“Nothing. Just appreciating your efforts”, they say. Gale would love to hear more about what exactly it is that Tav appreciates, but Yenna is still watching him intently so he goes back to holding out a fresh sage leaf to her so she can smell and taste it before he adds it to the soup.

As the smell of his soup spreads through the entire camp the rest of their colorful band of misfits starts gathering around.

“Well, well, well, Gale, have you finally found your match in the kitchen?”, Wyll says, his eyes crinkling in the corners as he settles down next to Tav on the ground.

Gale waves his spoon.

“Yenna has hereby been promoted to assistant chef”, he answers and Yenna beams.

“I will teach Sir Gale how to make an omelet tomorrow!”, she proclaims proudly, Grub now curled in her lap.

“Very impressive! I can’t wait to taste it”, Wyll says with a smile and winks at Yenna.

“Maybe I can also learn how to make some pie! I love pie. Mister Gale, Sir, can you teach me how to make pie?”

Gale thinks that it seems so mundane compared to everything else he’s been doing with his life up to this point. To sit here, around a fire, stirring a soup for a group of people who—in another life—would never have been in his inner social circle, being asked by a child for cooking lessons. It’s so different from everything Gale has experienced while he was with Mystra.

It’s trivial. It’s simple.

And yet it makes his heart sing in an entirely new way.

“I will have you know, I make the very best cherry pie in all of Waterdeep, young lady”, he says with a little flourish, using the spoon to underline his words dramatically. Yenna claps full of excitement. Grub purrs, Tav laughs and Wyll and Karlach shake their heads about his exaggeration.

And for this moment in time Gale thinks that he could be happy after all.

#gale dekarios #gale of waterdeep #yenna #bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #baldur's gate iii #bg3 fic #mi writes #bg3 spoilers #(for act 3 but mostly in the form of yenna the character)

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fluorescentbalaclava · 5 months

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✧ Elysen "Ellie" Duskvale, the delight of Neverwinter

#baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #les mis #baldur's gate iii #tav baldur's gate #elysen #glamour bard #bard #dnd oc #dnd character #dnd art #dnd #dungeons and dragons #my art #my artwork #art #illustration #sketchbook #tiefling

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squash1 · 1 year

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ronan lynch really went from eating cold beans straight out of the can in his childhood bed to committing ecoterrorism (and then saving the world from that ecoterrorism) so anything’s possible

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james-p-sullivan · 2 months

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Monsters at Work season 2 trailer

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secretmellowblog · 2 years

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SO true

#les mis #victor hugo #learning about Hugo's war crimes really does completely shatter your perspective of him #and reframes a lot of the book #im making this as a joke meme but yeah it was Awful #I'm not sure if Pilf or someones already made a post explaining it for tumblr?#the basic context is that Hugo was on 'the wrong side' of the Barricades in 1848 #working with Napoleon III's regime to violently crush a (justified) working class rebellion against the regime's new draconian labor laws #edit: I got it wrong it was in the interim regime between Philippe and Napoleon iii — not Napoleon iii’s official reign yet #he killed a lot of people (even when he couldve saved lives with diplomacy)#in large part because he was also suicidal at the time #and yeah the more context ya get the worse it looks #yeah his politics changed drastically later on but like. Yike #like he later became very pro barricade and anti Napoleons but. yee #maybe part of why his writing on Javert is good is because he has experience committing atrocities for an unjust authority #:P

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tomhardymyking · 3 months

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Today marks 6 years since 𝗧𝗼𝗺 attended the 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞'𝐬 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐀𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 in 2018 💖

𝗧𝗼𝗺, with a suit, the coat... ❤️‍🔥 Perfection 💯

The 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞'𝐬 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭 is a United Kingdom-based charity founded by 𝗞𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗜𝗜𝗜 (then 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗪𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀) to help vulnerable young people get their lives on track 👏🏻 𝗧𝗼𝗺 is one of the ambassadors 🤍

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Hoy se cumplen 6 años de cuando 𝗧𝗼𝗺 asistió a los 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐨𝐬 de 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞'𝐬 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭 en 2018 💖

𝗧𝗼𝗺, con traje, el abrigo... ❤️‍🔥 Perfección 💯

𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞'𝐬 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭 es una entidad caritativa del Reino Unido fundada por el 𝗿𝗲𝘆 𝗖𝗮𝗿𝗹𝗼𝘀 𝗜𝗜𝗜 (entonces 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗲 𝗱𝗲 𝗚𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀) para ayudar a personas jóvenes 👏🏻 𝗧𝗼𝗺 es uno de los embajadores 🤍

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#tom hardy #edward thomas hardy #2018 #princes trust #prince's trust #king charles III #prince of wales #my edits #mis edits

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bowowowie · 1 year

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i am so devastated thinking ab the saw iii deleted scene w adam and amanda . they couldve been BESTIES!!!!! i will never recover from adams death . where is his tboy swag when i need it. in my mind he survived his trap & eventually forgave amanda and rhey were best friends. & i will happily live in denial

#saw iii #amanda young #adam faulkner stanheight #i am devastated #in shambles #adam come home i mis u…

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aulel-process · 10 months

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Jay Steffy, Interior, Circa 1980

I can't find much on Jay Steffy's design philosophy but I read his 1980s interior as postmodern.

"Postmodernism had begun as a radical fringe movement in the 1970s, but became the dominant look of the 1980s, the 'designer decade'. Vivid colour, theatricality and exaggeration: everything was a style statement. Whether surfaces were glossy, faked or deliberately distressed, they reflected the desire to combine subversive statements with commercial appeal. Magazines and music were important mediums for disseminating this new phase of Postmodernism. The work of Italian designers – especially the groups Studio Alchymia and Memphis – was promoted across the world through publications like Domus. Meanwhile, the energy of post-punk subculture was broadcast far and wide through music videos and cutting-edge graphics. This was the moment of the New Wave: a few thrilling years when image was everything." ( 1 )

"The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization." ( 2 )

Piazza D'Italia, Charles Moore and August Perez III, 1978

Robert A. M. Stern: Residence and Pool House Llewelyn Park, New Jersey, 1982

M2 building, Kengo Kuma, Japan, 1991

"Less is More" "Less is a Bore" LOL:

"If the Modernist movement could be epitomized in a single phrase, many would choose Mies van der Rohe’s succinct utterance, “less is more.” Three authoritative words, three stern syllables: The slogan came to embody the very architectural language it engendered, spawning a whole generation of architects who sought to strip back buildings to their bare essentials.

Mies and many of his Modernist peers advocated the abolition of the superfluous, arguing that ornamentation was a distraction from the beauty of structural rationality, or — worse still — an unethical symbol of extravagance.

Of course, as with any ideological action, there is a reaction, and this is where American architect Robert Venturi came in. Together with his wife Denise Scott Brown, the late Robert Venturi strove to rewrite the book (sometimes quite literally) on modern architectural design, challenging the principles of the Modernist movement with experimentation and witty provocation.

Venturi pinpointed Mies’ sound bite as a key source of influence and countered with his own, simultaneously playful and cutting in its candor: “Less is a bore.”

Venturi’s instantly memorable quote — its fame perhaps only surpassed by Mies’ oxymoronic original — became the mantra for an entire architectural movement. Postmodernism ushered in an age of warmer architecture, buildings full of character that displayed a greater sensitivity toward context, urban landscapes ingrained with more humor and humility than the earnest monuments of 20th-century Modernism.

... For [Venturi], this was the architecture of gentle anarchy, of free-spirited optimism, of unbridled joy." ( 3 )

#architecture #venturi #mies van der rohe #modernity #postmodernity #kengo kuma #charles moore #robert stern #august perez iii #postmodern #modern

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chacusha · 24 days

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6 and 19 for the Soulcalibur Ask List

6. Who is your favorite character design?

Ooh this is hard! If we're talking which character is my favorite overall across all of their designs, I would probably say Setsuka. Why Setsuka? Her costumes from the start have always been very detailed and elaborate (I guess she benefits from being introduced relatively late in the series, when SC could go all out on the graphics!). The "East meets West" idea behind her design is such a fascinating concept, which is explored in so many different ways in her designs. And she gets such interesting color palettes, whether it's the pink and red of her "Queen of Hearts" SCIII design, the purple and pink of her "Cho-han Dealer" SCIV design, or the black and gold of her "Cool Delinquent Coat Cape" SCVI design.

If we're talking about single favorite design across all games, it's Seong Mi-na's SCIII 2P costume for me. This look is unparalleled IMO. Her hairstyle is so cute. The asymmetric strap and sheer material of her top! The side-slit pants! The green and blue color scheme, which is so different from what she normally wears, but which suits her 100%. *_*

19. Which game do you think has the best opening?

I struggled more than I expected with this question. My first thought was "SCIII!" then I thought "Wait, what about Soul Edge?" and then I thought "Maybe SCII is my favorite???" But now I'm back to saying Soul Edge:

youtube

Selling points:

The "Edge of Soul" song is bomb.

...with visuals matched to the music.

Good intro to the full roster of characters -- with the exception of the villains (poor Voldo).

Dance break in the middle featuring ~The Ladies~

Despite the primitive graphics, this opening is action-packed and epic.

Thanks for the ask! 😊 Ask me Soulcalibur questions.

#soulcalibur #soul calibur #soulcalibur iii #soul edge #sc setsuka #seong mi-na #gif warning #gif

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cactusnymph · 5 months

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kiss 41 shadowheart/lae'zel please :o)

Shadowheart wishes that she could control her dreams. If she were able to Lae'zel would certainly feature in none of them—except maybe in those where Shadowheart gets to kick her ass. Sadly those dreams never seem to visit her in her sleep. Instead Shadowheart finds herself betrayed by her own subconscious as it keeps dragging the memory of Lae'zel kissing her to the surface.

That forked tongue in her mouth shouldn't make her feel as excited as it does and it definitely shouldn't keep invading her sleep—Lae'zel pressed up against her, her long tongue in Shadowheart's mouth, licking the side of her throat, wandering lower.

If anyone told her at the beginning of this insane journey that she would have wet dreams about Lae'zel she would have laughed and left. Now she finds herself with soaked underwear in the morning and a burning anger and shame in her guts whenever it happens.

The bandage around her palm is still there and Shadowheart should probably have ripped it off by now. Instead her fingers keep touching it, pressing against the rough fabric, feeling the seams of the wrapping that has gotten more skillful over the past few days since Shadowheart started teaching Lae'zel first aid—or, how Lae'zel keeps referring to it: Patchwork.

Shadowheart can tell that the others are eyeing this new development between the two of them wide-eyed (Gale), disbelieving (Wyll) and amused (Karlach). Teaching a githyanki warrior about medicine and how to close a wound instead of cutting into it deeper is a surreal experience. But Lae'zel seems determined so Shadowheart refuses to be left behind.

In the next dream Lae'zel is on top of her completely naked, pinning her to the ground with a knife against Shadowheart's throat. There's something to be said about the state of her mind and specifically her subconscious that this is something that gets her going. But right now everything is hazy and hot and there's that forked tongue right next to the knife's edge and—

When she wakes up the knife is still there and so is Lae'zel—although in the real version of it all there is no tongue at her throat and Lae'zel is fully dressed.

Lae'zel sneers down at her.

"You've been feverish and making pained sounds in your sleep. If you're turning into a ghaik I'll give you a quick death", Lae'zel hisses and the blade presses against Shadowheart's skin like a promise. Despite the seriousness of the situation she almost has to laugh. Maybe there should be fear lingering underneath all of it, but all Shadowheart can really focus is on the cold steel on her skin, the weight on top of her and the heat between her legs.

Great.

"I'm not turning into anything, you absolute lunatic", she hisses back, heat rising into her cheeks as she tries to struggle against the iron clad grip of Lae'zel's hand.

"There is sweat on your brow", Lae'zel prompts. Shadowheart thinks that Lae'zel must be the stupidest person she's ever met.

"So what? You never sweat in your sleep? Are gith above sweating now?"

She could swear that Lae'zel is inhaling. Shadowheart thinks that maybe she has to ask Karlach to hit her really hard with a hammer so she can stop being insane about damned Lae'zel.

"Then what of the noises?", Lae'zel asks and she leans even further down as if she's trying to find a Mindflayer staring back at her from the depths of Shadowheart's eyes. Shadowheart is mortified enough about having been found out while having a wet dream about Lae'zel of all people, but the fact that Lae'zel makes into so big a thing is really starting to annoy her. Why can't Lae'zel mind her own damn business?

"My noises are none of your concern", Shadowheart presses and struggles again. Lae'zel's pupils widen.

"They are when you keep me from sleeping."

"I didn't think a small whimper could disturb you this much."

"It does when it's coming from you. You are the most—"

Shadowheart doesn't allow Lae'zel to finish. She surges upwards and presses her lips against Lae'zel's, causing the knife to dig deeper into her skin. The second their mouths collide, Lae'zel drops the knife and then they're kissing again.

Gods, it's so much better than it's been in any of her dreams. Lae'zel's tongue slides into her mouth and Shadowheart opens up willingly, wrapping her legs around Lae'zel's waist to pull her down. Lae'zel's breath is coming in short pants and Shadowheart is pleased to know that she's just as affected by all of this.

"So my noises keep you from sleeping?", Shadowheart pants into the kiss. Lae'zel snarls.

"Shut your mouth."

"Why don't you make me shut it?"

"Guys, please. Please find a tent", Gale's tired and strangled voice comes from his bedroll and Shadowheart can feel Lae'zel tense and pull back and before Shadowheart can say anything Lae'zel is gone.

#laeheart #shae'zel #shadowzel #bg3 fic #bg3 #lae'zel #shadowheart #baldur's gate 3 #baldur's gate iii #mi writes #the rituals are intricate etcetc

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maxwell-grant · 2 years

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Speaking of Pulp Heroes and their rather more fraught relationship with the authorities than their 4-Color successors when I read the first couple Secret Agent "X" stories, it felt like he has a buffoonish cop nemesis solely because the writer felt the genre's tropes required him to have a buffoonish cop nemesis. So. Why do so many Pulp Heroes feel a need to have a cartoon caricature of Inspector Javert in their cast?

(Inspector Javert art by dasha-ko)

The simplest answer is that much of it can be chalked up to the importance pop culture osmosis plays in how we construct stories, especially when we're explicitly trying to reference existing tradition or building off an established mold. So much of superhero fiction's origins are built off the American pulp stock and trade, and so much of that in turn is owed to the British and French pulp fiction. And when people look at the history of detective/crime fiction history and it's origins, and the role of characters like Arsene Lupin's Ganimard, Fantomas' Juve, Jacques Closeau, Harvey Bullock, Zenigata and so on, they quite reasonably assume that, much like how tight circus costumes are grandfathered into the superhero concept, it's assumed that every Gentleman Thief protagonist needs a Ungentlemanly Cop arch-nemesis / annoyance, because that's just how the concept works. The longer answer means that we gotta talk about Inspector Javert specifically, and why he ended up becoming such an imitated touchstone for pulp fiction.

The fact that so many of them take up after Javert specifically is interesting in itself, because it's not just a result to Javert being one of the most popular mainstream examples of "bad cop" characters and thus the go-to example when you want your cops and detectives to be, at a minimum, dumb obtrusive goons who can have a change of heart and, at worst, one-note villains who usually still aren't quite bad to overshadow the more interesting villains and piss off real cops who are a million times worse than what you can usually show in fiction get in trouble with audiences for disrespecting authority. In some ways, they miss the point of Javert, but also expand on the point Victor Hugo was making with him and the novel as a whole, which was in some ways a response to what the serialized fiction tradition was like at the time, as part of Hugo's intended aim of advocating for social reform:

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless

A lot of people miss the fact that Javert did not exist in a vacuum. He wasn't just designed to be a criticism of law enforcement and a rotten cop or whatever, he was explicitly based on Inspector Eugéne Vidocq. Claims about his real life achievements are countless and self-aggrandizing and none of them matter here except for one fact: His memoirs published in 1829 are said to be the bedrock where this entire concept of "detective fiction" started, at least in the anglo-sphere (although his effect loomed globally). Vidocq was not only the inspiration for Javert (as well as Valjean), but he was also the inspiration for Rodolphe de Gerolstein in The Mysteries of Paris, Monsieur Lecoq who would go on to inspire Holmes, and long before that he inspired Edgar Allan Poe's C.Auguste Dupin, who was an unflattering take on Vidocq, and is considered the first fictional detective.

Detective fiction existed some ways before Poe's Dupin via magazines and newspapers, as the concept of the "private detective" started taking form circa the turn of the 19th century and, as all new things tend to develop, fiction started to develop about them, largely thanks to the memoirs and autobiographies of officers like Vidocq, to the point that by the 1830s, virtually all detective fiction was about private detectives. I'm linking this thread on the Pinkertons that Jess Nevins wrote on Twitter here, in case more of you wanna dive deep into where this grody copaganda business took it's baby steps to sink it’s teeth into fiction to never let go, but the point being: For about half a century, the whole concept of the Great Detective, the central figure of detective fiction and of much of popular fiction as a whole, was based on Inspector Vidocq, and that was what Victor Hugo was responding to when he made Javert. He was based on The Super Cop, the Cop of the Century for that era, and here's another dirty secret that even most Les Mis adaptations get wrong about Javert: He IS a Super Cop. In-universe, he's the best damn cop in the whole world.

He is without vices, but upon occasion will take a pinch of snuff. His life is one of privations, isolation, self-denial, and chastity—never any amusement

He would have arrested his own father if he escaped from prison and turned in his own mother for breaking parole. And he would have done it with that sort of interior satisfaction that springs from virtue.

He is every bit the incorruptible paragon of order and devotion that people tend to attribute to characters like Jim Gordon. He’s honest to a fault to a point he insists that, if he were to be dishonest, he should not only be resigned, but also punished, should he commit any injustice on others. Other cops in the story dislike and distrust him specifically because he’s not corrupt. He’s as unrelentingly hard on himself as he is to everyone else, and it literally kills him the second he’s forced to grow a seed of conscience towards those he spent his entire life oppressing. He is, by basically every metric, a Good Cop, an unusually good cop at that, and he is a bad, rotten person, because that’s what it takes to be a good cop. He isn’t bad because he’s “one rotten apple”, he isn’t bad because he’s just too obsessed with one particular man, he is bad specifically because he’s a good cop, and he is very good at serving a terrible system, and he is very good at enduring and enforcing it’s cruelties, and the moment he is forced to question to it, when he’s no longer a “good cop”, he kills himself because that’s his way of resigning from life.

He had lost his bearings in this unexpected presence; he did not know what to do with this superior (convict); he who was not ignorant that the subordinate is bound always to yield, that he ought neither to disobey, nor to blame, nor to discuss, and that, in the presence of this superior who astonishes him too much, the inferior has no resource but resignation. But how to manage to send in his resignation to God? - Victor Hugo

It was a very damning perspective that Hugo was putting forth with this character, not just as a criticism of law enforcement, but also as an open dialogue with pretty much the entirety of the feuilleton traditions that informed the century, of the uncorruptible, inscrutable, unfailingly correct detectives stomping on wicked criminals, a condemnation somehow more timeless in 1863 than countless other takes on the story across the couple of centuries since that downplayed what exactly Hugo was getting at and why Javert was that way. Javert was a response to almost 50 years worth of how the entire concept of detective fiction worked and was seemingly supposed to work forever. So, obviously when it was time for others to twist the concept further and start focusing on the daring thieves and arch-criminals for a change, well, if these characters are supposed to stand against the law at it’s mightiest and get away with it, and you don’t quite feel like buggering Conan Doyle again, what other archetype are you gonna invoke as the allmighty, yet failed, representative of the power of The Law?

(Pictured: Inspector Zenigata, Inspector Lunge fan-art by admhire, Hank Schrader)

The Javert / Inspector has become an ubiquitous staple not just of fiction that stars gentleman thieves that, even when they are not specifically modeled after Javert, they often hit on many of the same notes that made Javert so enduring and potent of a character. It’s kind of almost a necessity, if you’re writing a story that focuses on a criminal, to see what does the law enforcement he opposes on some level looks like, and it makes for some pretty varied and interesting characters, often with some of the most interesting dynamics these stories have to offer.

Sometimes you get characters who actually do need to be serious and heroic, if only because of the sheer scale or menace of what they’re up against, and because they don’t get to win, they can be played for tragedy, characters like Inspector Juve or Hank Schrader, who is interesting as he is very much not a Javert-kind of character at first and probably never would have come close to being one, if he didn’t find himself thrust into the position of Heisenberg’s arch-nemesis and thus had to try and make himself into the extraordinary pursuer of justice, to disastrous consequences. Zenigata’s one of a kind as, somehow both a Super Cop as well as the absolute worst cop alive and only one by the thinnest thread possible (which is part of why he’s ultimately sympathetic, because his morals usually come first and he will team up with Lupin to solve bigger problems), a more deranged nutjob than the entire gang of master thieves he keeps up with. He stretches the broad strokes of the Javert archetype to such an extreme while still remaining ultimately a moral character that he winds up becoming as much of a cop as Mario is a plumber, and an indispensable part of the gag while still being very much not just a gag character.

Lunge’s on a totally opposite end of a similar scale, in that he’s a direct response to Javert as well as Holmes, demonstrating what an unflinching obsessive devotion to the law as well as a restless genial crime-solving brain does to someone who is not afforded a protagonist safety net or that sheen of fantasy most fiction affords these characters: it basically leads him to torpedo his life of everything that doesn’t get him to capture the criminal he mistakenly pursues, and it doesn’t bring him any step closer to stopping the real mastermind either, and it’s not until he owns up to his mistakes and starts to understand the story he’s in that he starts to actually help.

You can play these characters up as seriously, or as comedically, as you’d like. Sometimes they are overzealous clowns who never stood a chance and exist to make our protagonist and other villains seem cooler by comparison, and sometimes they make for such hilariously “bad” cops that they actually end up being pretty decent and even potential allies (like Chase Devineaux from Carmen Sandiego). Often, they can be a concentrated amalgam of the writer’s own feelings towards law enforcement and policing and carceral systems and whatnot, which often makes them complicated in ways even the authors don’t quite intend them to be.

A massive part of why we enjoy these kinds of stories comes in the form of transgressive fantasies where people can trick or escape or overpower or even take over and change the systems that routinely make life so difficult for us. So much of detective fiction stars police protagonists because they place readers in the shoes of getting to be the ones with the power of the jackboots for a change, but copaganda is not synonymous with detective fiction, and hasn’t been for well over a hundred years, much of it for so long has reveled in characters who are not police or police-adjacent. These characters often stand, in turn, as many things that you might need a cop in the story for, almost like a concentrated focal point.

Maybe you want to explore the ramifications of law enforcement in your fantasy world, maybe you do believe that cops can still be salvageable and you want to show what a “good one” would look like in your view, maybe you can’t think of them as anything other than distractions at best and chief enforcers of all wrong with the world at worst, or maybe you just put em in there so you can go “Oh, what would the cops do about my hero? They would hate them because they’re too cool and they would suck at stopping them, end of story, let’s move on to more interesting stuff”.

They aren’t always the most interesting characters, especially when they are just 1-to-1 Javert clones who remain neutral or mistake the point of Javert for simple-minded obsession, but they are always very telling characters, and they are not just a crucial archetype for what makes this kind of fiction work, but also a very significant touchstone of it’s inception and how far it’s come, and often, just fun to have around to make idiots of themselves, when fiction lets us get away with that. Fiction lets us get away with softening the edges of a lot of things we need outlets to confront safely (what else lets us do that?), this being one of them. Even when they suck, and they’re pretty much made to suck most of the time, I’m glad this archetype stuck around.

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