Raoul is not an American High School Jock

[igenlode]

When people write High School AU fanfic, Erik is always cast as the sensitive loner and Raoul as the 'jock' with seamless self-confidence who bullies him; from Raoul's point of view, a more realistic rendition would be to cast *him* as the wimpy kid who doesn't know how to handle his crush on that girl from the other side of the tracks who hangs around with all the wrong people. The boy who messes up every time he tries to talk to her and gets generally ignored and laughed at, and who finds threatening notes left on his locker from one of the 'seniors' with a reputation for beating people up in dark corridors and creeping out the younger girls.

Raoul is very conscious of his own inexperience, and he has a sneaking worry that Christine's life has given her a fast-forward in that particular area and that she is simply playing with him while giving an ear to a more experienced suitor -- a sophisticated man who knows how to tempt innocent maidens with tantalizing corruptions and wants to lure Christine into his own demi-monde :-(
What he doesn't know (and can't possibly know), of course, is that Erik, while far more gifted and dangerous than he can imagine, is as inept in courtship as he himself is. But then Erik, being outside the laws of society, doesn't *need* to bother to court a girl when he can just resort to taking her...

Most of the things that Raoul says in the novel are either perfectly reasonable from the viewpoint of his own insecurities or else things that he *knows* are unreasonable (but says anyway because he is hurt and angry). And note that he loses I think every argument with Christine that he ever has in the whole novel.
Even when he is right, i.e. about Spirits of Music not descending to earth to give vocal training to young women in theatre dressing-rooms at eight o'clock in the morning ;-D
Funny how fanfic never seems to use the early-morning time: presumably it's not seen as romantic to have Christine getting up in the dark (the lessons start in winter) and going off to work :-p

Raoul certainly isn't the Ideal Boyfriend that the Labrador-puppy brigade like to paint him as -- the one who bakes cakes in the morning and rubs Christine's back in the shower and is endlessly calm and forgiving and gets up at night with baby bottles. I don't even recognise that character from anywhere in the story; it's just a girl's idea of what A Woman Deserves out of a relationship.

But he is definitely not stupid -- even if sometimes he uses his intelligence and imagination to torture himself with possibilities :-p His main problem is that he gets too emotional to think clearly: in several places Leroux shows us Raoul making an effort to sit down and reason things through logically (when he remembers the story of the singer Raff who pretended to be the dead husband of the Princess Belmonte, for example), and as I pointed out in "The Sons of Eleonore" he manages to organise what would presumably have been a successful surreptitious journey abroad for Christine and himself at twelve hours' notice, which suggests that his training as a ship's officer was not entirely wasted. He is, after all, said to have passed out at the top of his class there, doubtless much to Philippe's pride :-D