*gasp* I Love Them

leroux style

yes all my favorite characters are desperate to be loved. no i don’t think that says anything about me

Yes, in fact

you ever just going about your day and then the weight of 'he had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar' hits you and you want to launch yourself over a cliff due to the sheer emotion

Redemption.

This.

the thing, why Erik and Christine is my ship and beyond that the dynamic that fascinated me the most is because their relationship is so toxic and so beautiful and so layered. it's like...i am the angel your dead father sent you, you are my angel of music, i am your father (figure), i am your teacher, you are my teacher, you're my muse, you're my victim, i am yours, you made me experience musical ecstasy, you too, you guided me out of my grief, i am grieving because of you, you're the normalcy i long for, you bring out the side in me i didn't even know i had, i've never been so happy, i've never been so frightened, i've never been so desperate, i want to die because of you, i want you to kill us both, he's just a man, he's every shadow, she's just a woman, she saved everyone, it's just a kiss, no, it means everything!

Erik and Christine are an abuser and his victim but they were also two lonely, broken people who found solace in each other, they are also musical geniuses inspiring each other to inhuman achievements in their art, they share are bond that even they can't really understand or anyone else.

I also love the weathered frenemy relationship he has with the Daroga and Raoul is also a perfectly nice young man who, in my opinion, is the most interesting when he's at his worst (jealous) and I love that everyone has fun with their non canon ships too. But Erik and Christine's dynamic will always be like crack to me personally. They're Death and the Maiden, Hades and Persephone, Mephisto and Faust/Margarete, the Rose and the Nightingale, Beauty and the Beast, they're opposites, they can't be together, they're day and night AND YET

ah! Fate links thee to me, forever and a day...

“know that I am built up of death from head to foot and that it is a corpse that loves you and adores you and will never,never leave you!”

The Exterior Artwork on The Opera House

The Dance by Carpeaux —&— Lyrical Drama by Perraud

Why. Just, why. This is a beautiful horror tragedy following a murderer skeleton who sleeps in a coffin and writes his musical scores in blood—a story of obsession and sorrow—NOT a story for YA adaptation. That’d be like turning Dracula into a YA story—oh, wait, they did, it’s called Twilight.

I hate this world.

You know when I said I wanted more original Phantom of the Opera adaptations, having the director of High School Musical making a YA version for Disney + really isn't what I had in mind

[…] for when one has fire within and a soul, one cannot keep bottling them up – better to burn than to burst […]

Vincent van Gogh, from ‘The Letters of Vincent van Gogh’ ⁠— Wilhelmina van Gogh c. summer or autumn 1887, tr. Arnold Pomerans

John Russell

Portrait of Vincent Van Gogh

Paris, 1886