I Mentioned Victor's Delusions In Brief Previously (here), But Because Of The Inherent Complexity (and

In switzerland straight up frankin’ it and by “it” lets jusst say… my stein

I want to preface this with that it is all in friendly debate, for the sake of media analysis, and I don’t mean to come off too strong or as if I am upset/angry - I’m just passionate !!

Why can you sympathize with the Creature, literal murderer 3x over, but not Victor, who had realistic (and at times reasonable) reactions given the circumstances? Do Victor’s very genuine and understandable pains and sufferings condemn the Creature as well, then? Why can we apply this logic to the Creature but not to Victor? And do Victor’s pain and sufferings both pre-Ingolstadt (weird and wacky childhood, excessive expectations from family, mother dying) and post Ingolstadt (grieving the recent loss of his mother, a big life change that he necessarily didn’t want [college in foreign area], severe mental and physical illness) not explain HIS actions and make him more sympathetic?

“He spent months looking at his creation, why the sudden reaction, when he succeeded at bring him to life?” Looking at a still corpse on a table is much different then looking at an Alive, Moving corpse. 

Also, he wanted or considered stopping several times but was so out of it and had severe obsessive compulsions that kept him from eating and sleeping. He could not, in his own mind, have easily stopped at any time nor was of sound enough mind to realize the extent of what he was doing. And Victor just generally lacks foresight and what is obvious to the reader (that you should prepare to take care of your reanimated corpse) was not obvious to Victor at the time. He didn’t know or consider, nor was he in the right state of mind to know or consider, that the Creature was going to rely on him.

He didn’t suddenly up and flee from a lack of backbone. Victor was sick, manic, hallucinating and dying and had been for MONTHS. He’d been sticking his unwashed, grubby hands in gore pre-germ theory, for, like, two years by now. He didn’t just see the Creature’s spooky eyes and scream and run away. It was so bad he literally didn’t have the strength to hold a pen for months afterwards, writing a letter took everything out of him.

Also - why are we condemning Victor for having a sudden and strong reaction (fleeing the scene and leaving Creature) but not the Creature (being rejected by DeLaceys, burning their house down and going off on a murder spree)?

Yes, Vic made Creature and he was therefore responsible for him, but it would have been bad for Creature and Victor both for Vic to be solely responsible and care for Creature. Even if Victor was physically well enough to care for a newborn (he wasn’t) he was NOT mentally well enough or in the right mind to care for another being, and that would have been damaging for the both of them. It was better for them to be separated for the good of both Vic and Creech. 

Now, Creature shouldn’t have been abandoned, but in the best case scenario someone should have intervened and/or Victor asks someone for help (Henry), but even Henry and Victor alone couldn’t have cared for Creature properly. They’re two teenagers in college classes. Henry spent all his free time nursing Victor back to health from the brink of death after a mental health crisis. They would have had to get outside help - and who would have helped them with their corpse experiment? There was no chance of a stable upbringing for the First Reanimated Corpse no matter the outcome or choices made.  

I don’t think Victor had ‘several opportunities to interfere in the Creature’s life and do the right thing.’ They only met face-to-face about three times: notably, when the Creature first woke, their confrontation in the alps, and while Victor was creating the bride. The first time Victor was deathly sick, feverish and hallucinating that the Creature wanted to kill him. The second time was after Creature killed William, and Victor was actually very charitable for the circumstances IMO. I don’t blame him for starting off swinging - I’d do the same if I thought someone else killed my little brother. And, AFTER the murder of his little brother, Victor still wound up agreeing to make the Creature a wife, even if he went back on the deal. I’ll elaborate more on the Bride later.

You say Creature showed remorse but that Victor failed to feel remorse or compassion entirely, only self-pity. I disagree. Victor was canonically so moved (he literally admits to being moved) by the Creature’s story to the extent that he went from trying to pummel him to agreeing to make him a wife (the creation of which nearly killed him in the past). This is all AFTER Victor believes the Creature killed William. Let’s look at a few quotes during their confrontation in the alps:

“For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness. These motives urged me to comply with his demand”

“His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought that, as I could not sympathise with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow.”

“I was moved. I shuddered when I thought of the possible consequences of my consent; but I felt that there was some justice in his argument. His tale, and the feelings he now expressed, proved him to be a creature of fine sensations; and did I not as his maker owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in my power to bestow?”

Victor both takes accountability here (owns up to his duties as creator to owe him the happiness he had the power to bestow) and feels compassion towards him, he tries to wrangle down his own horror and hatred to at least hear the Creature out fairly.

“The only thing he felt was self-pity. Even his attempts at killing the Creature weren’t really motivated by responsibility and stopping the killings. It was pure self-indulgent revenge.” Revenge for… killing his family members, right? Wasn’t his motivation to stop the murders of his family (or at least avenge them), then?

I think it’s an unfair expectation in the first place for Victor to make the Creature a bride. The toll it took on Victor’s physical and mental health nearly killed him the first time around, and left him bedridden with fever, chronically ill, hallucinatory, and traumatized. That’s enough reason to not do it alone, on top of Victor being frightened of two creatures existing. Is Victor supposed to go through that again? Your proposition for Victor to stop the killings (something the Creature, uh, shouldn’t be doing in the first place and can stop anytime LOL) is for Victor to what - risk killing himself? And even if Victor’s reasoning for destroying the Bride were wholly rooted in hate, pride, cowardice and selfishness -  what of the Bride’s autonomy? She’s just supposed to wake up and live as Creature’s ready-to-go-GF and be perfectly happy?

The Creature already knew right from wrong without Victor’s influence by the time he killed William. While yes, he was only ever met with violence himself, he observed and understood, from the outside, love and affection. He understood society and dynamics and morals well enough from his time watching the DeLaceys, and still chose to burn down their house and murder an innocent child - Creature knew better, and he chose violence and he chose revenge. You say it could have been prevented ‘with an ounce of decency’ on Victor’s part. But the Creature was at fault in the first place for understanding the gravity of what he was doing, and still choosing to murder. This shouldn’t have been something Victor was expected to prevent - Creature zsimply should not have done it. Also, if my son murdered my little brother, my best friend/boyfriend, and my sister-cousin-wife, I’d hate him too. That’s justified. 

Also are you genuinely trying to tell me you would be super understanding and reasonable and forgive the murderer of your little brother had you been in Victor’s shoes??

‘I don’t believe revenge is ever justified. If Victor had killed the creature from a sense of justice or wanting to protect others, I could have accepted that.  But, it wasn’t that, imho.’ But you can accept (not condone, but accept) and sympathize with Creature’s actions, who murdered innocent people for revenge? What horrible act of revenge did Victor even perform? He realized that people shouldn’t make ready-to-go-GFs and went back on a deal that could have killed him or made him deathly sick?  

I think pinning the responsibility of Justine’s execution wholly on Victor is wrong, and blaming his inaction entirely on pure cowardice is wrong as well.

Victor had just barely recovered from a near death experience where he was feverish and hallucinating (and possibly still hallucinating just days before, after walking out all day and night in the rain). He was not thinking clearly and certainly not in a proper state to testify for someone on trial and/or defend himself on trial if he put the blame on himself.

Also, I don’t expect Victor to be the beacon of morals and sound reasoning not only after his brother was just MURDERED, but also after just recovering from a near-death experience, while suffering from untreated severe mental illness that actively disrupts reality.

Victor’s reasoning for not speaking up about the Creature in court was this:

“My first thought was to discover what I knew of the murderer, and cause instant pursuit to be made. But I paused when I reflected on the story that I had to tell. A being whom I myself had formed, and endued with life, had met me at midnight among the precipices of an inaccessible mountain. I remembered also the nervous fever with which I had been seized just at the time that I dated my creation, and which would give an air of delirium to a tale otherwise so utterly improbable. I well knew that if any other had communicated such a relation to me, I should have looked upon it as the ravings of insanity… These reflections determined me, and I resolved to remain silent”

His original intent WAS to tell everyone the truth, so that the Creature could be condemned. He immediately told his family - the people closest to him - that he knew the murderer, and that it couldn’t be Justine. They all dismiss him immediately (apart from Elizabeth, who was bent on Justine’s innocence). If his own family won’t believe him, how is he supposed to sway the court? 

So Victor decides not to tell the court, because he believed that they would take him (a person who had been recently sick, hallucinatory and feverish for months) and think it the ramblings of a madman or of the ill (which was exactly what Henry did to him, what his family did to him, and what the police did to him). And while we don’t know what would have happened had Victor actually told the court, we do have a similar circumstance after Elizabeth’s death where, after a similar bout of illness, Victor goes straight to the magistrate and tells them the story. He was not believed and was dismissed. So Victor’s reasoning doesn’t really feel unfounded here, and definitely not from a place of pure cowardice and/or pride.

I don’t feel there was any good possible outcome for the trial. What struck me as the most unfair was not Victor’s actions or lack of action but the way Justine was trialed itself. The judges manipulated her into a coerced confession. Her confessor threatened excommunication and damnation until she began to think she was the monster that he said she was. Justine’s confession is what decided her fate above all else, not Victor’s lack of intervention.

You criticize Victor for 1) abandoning and hating his son, and 2) for not standing up for Justine in court. But if he had taken responsibility and viewed the creature as his child, what was Victor supposed to do? Point the finger at the Creature, his child, and condemn him for a murder in which he knows he would have been executed for had they believed him? 

The only other options Victor really had to 1) make up a feasible lie that he saw a strange man in the area, which would not be able to hold up against the literal evidence in Justine’s pocket, is easily dismissed as the ramblings of someone who was recently sick and feverish and spent the whole night walking in the rain, AND Victor wasn’t even in the area during the time of the crime or 2) Defend Justine’s character, which is what he DOES do before and after the trial (quote “my passionate and indignant appeals were lost on [the court]”), and exactly what Elizabeth does, which fails both times. He did try, just not in a way that would make himself out to be a madman and discredit everything he was saying.

At this point in the book, Victor had absolutely no evidence. Not even no evidence to present to the court - no evidence that the Creature had done it At All. Even if he made something up, it wouldn’t be as damning as the literal locket in Justine’s pocket. The only reason why Victor latched onto the idea of the Creature being the murderer of William was because, during a storm, he saw (or hallucinated) the silhouette of a tall figure that sort of resembled the Creature on his way home to Geneva. This took place OUTSIDE OF GENEVA, not even in the area William was murdered. It just so happened that Victor was correct and the Creature HAD killed William, but Victor was still jumping to conclusions at this point.

I also think it’s important to take in the context of Victor’s upbringing here. His father was a well-respected, distinguished syndic/judge. Victor grew up with a strong belief in the legal system. Before the trial he says something along the lines of “there's no WAY they would condemn Justine only on circumstantial evidence!” He had faith in it, he grew up with faith in it. If Victor had settled on a half-truth and pulled up and tried to go “I saw a big scary man” the court would have dismissed it as the ramblings of a sickly madman, and it could have tainted the Frankenstein family’s reputation and his father’s standing, who have historically for generations been counsellors and syndics. The current generation of Frankensteins including Victor were being reared and expected to carry on this legacy as well.

Justine’s explanation during her trial (essentially I didn’t do it, I wasn’t there, I don’t know how the locket got in my pocket) was much more feasible than Victor’s (I built a corpse man in my dorm room and I think I saw him in the middle of the night during a storm miles away from the crime scene so I just KNOW he killed William!) which wound up being the actual truth, and Justine was still executed.

He feels genuine remorse, guilt and self-hatred throughout the trial, and even has suicidal thoughts following it. He blames himself and thinks, paraphrasing here, “the deed [William’s murder] was not mine in name but in effect.” This wasn’t him being entirely self-pitying, self-preservational, shirking blame and sitting trembling in court here.

And while I agree that Victor is an unreliable narrator, I don’t think Victor’s reliability as a narrator matters much here about the whole ‘I’ll be with you on your wedding night’ shtick. I think Vic misinterpreted Creature here, that he genuinely thought the Creature was talking about him, not that he was making up this misinterpretation after the fact to glamorize things for Walton. And if we’re going to cherry-pick and dismiss what Victor says when it suits your argument then that same line of reasoning should apply to the Creature, who is ALSO an unreliable narrator and IMO just as unreliable if not more so.

Even if Victor married Elizabeth for selfish reasons (I don’t think this is true but I digress), he was still expected to marry her for the good of the family. It has been an expectation for them to be wed since they were six, they promised it to their mother together as her literal dying wish, Alphonse later tells Victor it would bring him happiness and unite the family in their time of mourning, etc. Even if Victor’s own intentions in marrying her were somehow selfish, its effect on the family wouldn’t have been selfish - they had told him it would make them happy. And I believe Elizabeth would have been harmed either way, had they been wed or not - he arguably loved Henry just as much as Elizabeth, and the Creature had no issues offing him, no marriage involved.

And blaming Victor and calling it an act of abject cowardice for being “terrified and traumatized” after abandoning the creature is. Uh. Let’s not blame trauma victims for. Having trauma??

The Creature made things worse, too. He could have. Y’know. Not murdered 3 people.

 I don’t think we should continue to blame Victor for making things worse when he really made very little choices (and had very little opportunity TO make choices) in the first place. /nm

So I finished reading the original Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and I do not understand in the SLIGHTEST why people insist that in the book the Creature is the victim of the story and Victor is the villain. Did we read the same fucking book??!!! The Creature is literally one of the most malicious villains I have EVER seen put to paper and actively chooses to commit evil act after evil act despite KNOWING it is wrong and feeling remorse and feeling horrible and yet consistently taunts and destroys Victor’s life OVER AND OVER.

The Creature kept bemoaning again and again that Victor had no idea the extent of his misery, that he was the most miserable creature on earth and nothing could fix this and I just??? Did people take him at his word??? The Creature of course believes this, but you go through the book seeing Victor grieve his loved ones viscerally and end up in prison accused of murdering his best friend, and a mental institution for what is likely psychosis. There is so much evidence in the book that the Creature is 100% biased and knew EXACTLY what he was doing in making Victor miserable and I agree in Walton calling him a hypocrite at the end. I just don’t understand how people can say he is the victim of this book when it describes in extremely visceral detail how the Creature systematically killed four people that Victor loved, the first being his 12 year old brother, all to make him miserable for the mistake of creating him. He never even SPOKE to Victor until he killed two people. Five people died in total, not counting Victor, considering his father died of grief due to Elizabeth’s death too.

Victor’s fuckups in this book, at least in my opinion, were normal human reactions to extreme situations. His single dumbest decision was running away from the Creature in horror when he brought him to life. He is an impulsive, reckless person but NONE of what he suffered could be justified by the Creature.

This is a massive ESH situation, heavily leaning towards the Creature as the biggest asshole in this entire story. I don’t even think his age justifies this, he acts and thinks and talks like an adult. He is fully cognizant of what he is doing to Victor and it is with the purpose of torturing him. He STATES this numerous times.

I don’t know where the hell the take that he is the victim of the story comes from because holy shit I don’t think it’s from people who read Mary Shelley’s book.

we all know modern day victor would have been making those shane dawson-style conspiracy theory/hoax challenge videos. im talking “MAKING A CREATURE 3AM CHALLENGE 🧌😰 *NOT CLICKBAIT*” while shitty lightning SFX play in the background. those content creators who made those potion videos where you drank some godawful concoction of salt and coca cola or whatever would have been his magnus and agrippa. he would have believed in them wholeheartedly and thought he was just doing it wrong

the best thing about frankenstein is he was basically like one of those ppl that gets sucked into conspiracy theories like geocentrism and stuff and then he went to college and realized he was totally wrong about everything

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

d ivorce means two christmases <3

this design is LOVELY!!! and in regard to the last bit: some of it is certainly some combination of both projection and fanon characterizations, but i’ve also seen convincing arguments for victor being autistic and/or bipolar, among many other things, and personally i think he has some sort of psychotic disorder—or at the very least, experienced psychosis—for reasons i’ll outline in its own separate post. the trans part tends to come from frankenstein being a female narrative synthesized through a male narrator, which results in transmasc subtext; this post expands on that more articulately than i have the capacity to right now!

Victor Frankenstein outfit and simple doodles.

I have a question for neurodivergent and trans people, is Victor Frankenstein neurodivergent? I've seen a lot of users depicting Victor as, neurodivergent, trans and homosexual.

While I can see the homosexuality, I don't get the neurodivergent and trans part bc I am cis and allistic. May someone explain it to me?

What up, I'm Robert, I'm 28, I'm gay, and I never fuckin' learned how to read.

compilation of mike girl moments

SORRY FOR ANY 60s cringe. but behold...

Me checking the Victor Frankenstein tag every 2 hours as if expecting the tag of the most hated and mischaracterized character of a 200 year old novel to suddenly blow up with content

It's crazy to me how people criticise Victor for making the creature without any thought of the consequences, but then also criticise him for not going along with creating a second one after considering the potential consequences

After being given life, the creature became his own person, developing his own identity. If Victor created another one, they would also develop their own identity and it is reasonable to imagine that their values would be different and they may not want to go away with the creature, or agree to live in solitude away from humanity. I think Victor stopping to realise that shows an amount of character development that people don't really acknowledge