Double standard alert!

[betweensunandmoon]

Raoul in badfic: A drunken man-whore who treats everyone around him terribly, especially Christine. This apparently makes him oh-so-repulsive.

Erik in The Last First Kiss: A drunken man-whore who treats everyone around him terribly, especially Christine. This apparently makes him oh-so-desirable.

Surely I'm not the only one who sees a problem with this?

Comments

[erimia]

It's pretty hard for me to take either Phantom or Raoul being man-whores seriously, it's just not their style.
There is definitely a double standard where Erik's suffering or vices make him oh-so-interesting and attractive while Raoul's suffering or vices are just not important even when exploring this subject further would have made a good story. That was my reaction to the infamous twist in The Phantom of Manhattan - who cares about this bullshit with Erik's lovechild, Raoul got his balls shot off, I want a novel-length angst fic about this!

[betweensunandmoon]

It's pretty hard for me to take either Phantom or Raoul being man-whores seriously, it's just not their style.
It's really not.

That was my reaction to the infamous twist in The Phantom of Manhattan - who cares about this bullshit with Erik's lovechild, Raoul got his balls shot off, I want a novel-length angst fic about this!
Poor Raoul. :(

How did he get shot? Does it say?

[erimia]

How did he get shot? Does it say?

Oh, he was shot by a mugger, when saving someone from getting mugged/raped, apparently. Very noble. All of this was, of course, to make sure no way the lovechild can be his. The Phantom Project reviewer had a BSOD over this lovely plot point:

The next part of this chapter, however, replaced sadness with a shocked, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder kind of incredulity. This is, verbatim, what my notes say at this point:

OH MY GOD YOU DID NOT JUST BLOW RAOUL'S DICK OFF TO MAKE SOME KIND OF IMPOTENCE/UNIMPORTANCE COMMENT

I'm sorry, enraged note-writer. You can deny it all you want in your zany, crooked scrawl of outrage, but that is in fact what happened. We're treated to another flashback-style retelling of events from Madame Giry's perspective, where we discover that she also "adopted" Raoul after, in a tragic sequence of events, he attempted to stop a rape/mugging in progress and was shot in the groin. I'm exaggerating a little bit; he does still have the equipment, but it doesn't actually work. In essence, he is permanently impotent (though everyone makes it a point to make sure we know that he can still feel desire and is just unable to act on it... because this wasn't miserable enough yet). So, according to Forsyth, Raoul was already unmanned by the time he met Christine again at the opera and swept her off. Many pointed statements, akin to, "Oh! How tragic that he can never marry! What kind of strange, desperate woman would marry him when he has no penis function?!", are made, hammering home the idea that Christine had to marry him because of her pregnancy and that he is essentially less than a man with all the subtlety of a jackhammer to the forehead.

To be fair, I am not impressed by Forsyth's whiny, snippy, regressing-to-childhood version of Erik, so he is correct that his readers might need a little push to regard him as the manly hero here. But was it really necessary to literally emasculate Raoul in order to make sure everyone was ABSOLUTELY SURE that not only is the child Erik's, but that Raoul is totally unable to compete with the Phantom's sexy allure in any way? Couldn't you have just written one character more strongly, or shown contrasting qualities? It makes my brain burn. While I have talked about Raoul's role as the traditional "sexless hero" of Gothic literature, that doesn't mean ACTUALLY sexless. It just means that he's sexually nonthreatening (i.e., safe, comforting, representative of stability and family), which he can definitely be while still having an intact babymaker. I doubt that Forsyth is trying to work with that idea here, since he doesn't actually work with any of the familiar roles of Leroux's work; and anyway, if he wanted to play with Gothic character types, being able to love a woman but unable to physically ravish her pretty much makes Raoul the perfect male love interest for that kind of literature, which is not what I think Forsyth is trying to go for.

http://phantomproject.pbworks.com/w/page/16258283/The%20Phantom%20of%20Manhattan%20by%20Frederick%20Forsyth%20(1999)

[erimia]

Also, this wanking is golden. Death!Sue wearing Armani isn't what I expected to see even in a bad POTO fanfic. I heard Wandering Child's fics were good, but apparently not really.

[betweensunandmoon]

Also, this wanking is golden.
You're right about that. :D

I heard Wandering Child's fics were good, but apparently not really.
I wouldn't know, since I can't find them on FF.net. Are they still available anywhere?

[erimia]

I wouldn't know, since I can't find them on FF.net. Are they still available anywhere?

I found her fic "Demons" in another site. I know almost nothing about this one except that it's movie!verse and that it does have Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune like in real history.