Phantom Thoughts pt. 8

[zellephantom]

{Raoul leaned against the panel to ease his pain. His heart, which had seemed gone for ever, returned to his breast and was throbbing loudly. The whole passage echoed with its beating and Raoul's ears were deafened. Surely, if his heart continued to make such a noise, they would hear it inside, they would open the door and the young man would be turned away in disgrace.}

Poor heartbroken Raoul. Feelings can be intense, especially young love. One minute, you're on cloud nine and the next you're down in the dumps. His current feelings remind me of this line from Charles Dance's Phantom in the 90s miniseries: "When you sing, I live in the Heavens. When you do not, down below."

I really want to know why his heart (presumably referring to romantic feelings?) had seemed "gone forever". Did he catch feelings for a nice foreign girl on his trip around the world, only to be rejected and forever parted from her? Is he just numb from Philippe's attempts to find him a girl in Paris? Had he buried his feelings in pursuit of a Navy career?

{What a position for a Chagny! To be caught listening behind a door!}

And yet he's not leaving... And he eavesdrops even more later in the novel, if I'm not mistaken...
Maybe this is just his mental interjection of 'What would Philippe do?', the answer being 'find a nice girl to flirt with while you're on furlough but don't marry her if she's not of high enough social status ALSO DON'T EAVESDROP AND SHAME THE FAMILY NAME'.

{The man's voice spoke again: "Are you very tired?"

"Oh, to-night I gave you my soul and I am dead!" Christine replied.

"Your soul is a beautiful thing, child," replied the grave man's voice, "and I thank you. No emperor ever received so fair a gift. THE ANGELS WEPT TONIGHT."}

Oh, my E/C shipper heart is bursting with feels!

But I'm still wondering if Raoul, due to his worries about his heartbeat being too loud, missed part of the conversation after "I sing only for you". Or maybe the Phantom is just trying to segue away from a topic that is clearly making Christine upset. (Now I have the mental image of the Phantom riding around on a Segway. Enjoy!)

Oooh, change in descriptions. First, he was masterful, and now he is merely grave (and probably feeling old and solemn and tired and reverent all at once).

I should also write a meta about the Phantom calling Christine 'Angel' in ALW, despite him being the one in the Angel role.

Comments

[zellephantom]

Interesting- so bro is some degree of international slang! Assuming that you did mean Japanese and not French in that last part, it makes sense, at least from my narrow realm of experience in My Hero Academia fanfiction, with some characters, particularly Kirishima, referring to each other as bro.

I don't remember off the top of my head if it's present much in the English dub of the show, but it's become relatively accepted fanon practice that Kirishima calls his close friend Bakugou 'Bakubro' and sometimes tries to fit bro in the names of his other friends if the fic involves them becoming better friends, i.e. 'Todobroki' for Todoroki, 'Midoribro' for Midoriya, and I've sometimes even seen 'Brochako' used to address the female character Uraraka Ochako. IDK how present it actually is in the original Japanese or non-English fanworks, so ymmv, but that's just what I've seen.

[igenlode]

I did mean Japanese, but I didn't mean that either they or the French literally say "bro"; that was just the 'street' translation being given in the studies I was looking at concerning the use of mon frère as a form of address by modern inner-city French youth.

For all I know modern Japanese *does* include the syllable "bro" in the way that it (apparently) uses traditional honorifics -- my knowledge of Japanese is entirely at second-hand from hearing other people complaining about anime fanfics. But what I was trying to say was that I've heard people complaining about fanfic using 'Little Brother' as a form of direct address, and that this was presumably as normal in Japanese as the corresponding form is in 19th-century French... and which happens to sound stilted in English, where it's *not* the custom.

My guess, as a complete non-Japanese-speaker, would be that this 'friendly-brother-suffix' (going by my knowledge of Japanese as a syllabic language with appended honorifics) is probably being added to the ends of characters' names in the original Japanese in order to indicate an honorary relationship, and that the English dub is trying to emulate this by inserting the syllable 'bro' into their names. Which is quite ingenious as a way of translating the untranslatable, if true.

But that is a complete stab in the dark!

[zellephantom]

Yes, I understood that- bro as in casual address for brother being used as slang, not literally the syllable bro :) I'm guessing what you mentioned is probably the case, but I don't really care to watch through the subs version and confirm it. (I watched subs for the first two seasons of Miraculous Ladybug, but NEVER AGAIN. Dubs are easier for me, even if certain shows feature... certain deliberate mistranslations *cough* the Miraculous Ladybug English dub changing Chat Noir's "I thought I lost you." in the original French to "That was a wild ride!" *cough*)

Thankfully, I've never read enough anime fanfic to complain about it- or maybe my standards are just very high for fanfiction nowadays. (For example, go on AO3, sort by bookmarks, usually filter for completed works only, exclude a bunch of tags and ships I dislike.. I'll pretty much only go on fanfiction.net if I've had a specific fic recommended to me that's only found there, which is often the case for Phantom fic.)

[igenlode]

I enjoy watching subtitled films when I speak the language to at least some degree, because I get the interest of doing the 'back-translation' from the meaning of what was said to identifying the actual words used -- something in Japanese might just as well be dubbed for all the difference it makes to me. (Subtitled Swedish was about the furthest I got from comprehensibility -- and I have a feeling it was a subtitled Swedish *silent* film, so I was comparing the written version in the two languages via my intermediate knowledge of German ;-)

It's a salutory experience to realise that when I have the [English] subtitles on a French film, I can pick up pretty much every word of the original French, but as soon as the subtitles cut out for any reason I really start to struggle to follow the dialogue -- knowing the *meaning* of a phrase in advance is sufficient to narrow down all the possibilities enormously, which gives an entirely spurious impression of fluency.

(I've got an archive DVD of the French TV production of Leroux's "La Poupée Sanglante", which is very good -- better than the original book, which gets rushed and facetious in the second half -- and because it wasn't commercially marketed to England, it only has French subtitles. On the other hand, because it's 'classic' TV from the 1970s, I can actually understand almost every word of the dialogue unsubtitled because it is all beautifully enunciated... but I come unstuck the instant a working-class dialect pops up. This is the point at which I have to enable the subtitles so that I can *read* what was supposed to have been said ;-p)

cough* the Miraculous Ladybug English dub changing Chat Noir's "I thought I lost you." in the original French to "That was a wild ride!" *cough*

That's a fairly major alteration of implication...

I'll pretty much only go on fanfiction.net if I've had a specific fic recommended to me that's only found there, which is often the case for Phantom fic.

I only go on AOL if I've met with a specific link pointing there -- the navigation is pretty rudimentary without JavaScript (the mobile FFnet is actually quite accessible), it has a fairly well-earned reputation for being full of mindless smut, and the tags are pretty useless, because people tag for *everything*. (An R/C tag might indicate that Raoul and Christine are married in the first chapter before she sees the error of her ways and escapes from her abusive husband, for example...)

But I can eliminate over 90% of what is posted to FFnet at a glance, either from tags or summaries; I once spent an evening working chronologically backwards through about three thousand stories over a period of several years, because there was a suspicious gap in my favourites list (mostly culled from looking at other people's favourites) and I wanted to see what I'd missed. I found *two* stories that were good enough to add :-(
(Plus, to be fair, a couple that I had already from that period.)

I did get a horrendous case of fanfic indigestion ;-p