[ SECRET POST #5398 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5398 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 38 secrets from Secret Submission Post #773.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

03. https://i.imgur.com/nkNgiSz.png

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for turning my comment into a secret, OP!

I only found out this version of Cyrano had been a stage production prior to the film after commenting here.

Per reviews, Dinklage did an awesome job, but his voice was only so-so. Since I've heard his big number is a rap-battle or patter song I guess it doesn't matter so much.

[meadowphoenix]

honestly i didn't mind phantom. butler's grating tone made up for the fact that there was zero reason to shun him, even if the lyrics about his voice didn't make sense.

[(Anonymous)]

Comment OP here and there was plenty of reason to shun him, given the whole stalking, kidnapping, murder, and death threats thing. I get that you mean his face wasn't so bad, though.

Idk I had lots of issues with the movie because I was a huge fan of the ALW phantom and the story more generally for a decade before the film came out, so all the changes pissed me off.

Especially casting a youngish, sexy, and not very talented singer to play an old, hideously ugly guy with a preternaturally beautiful voice that entranced anyone who heard it, and changing the character's backstory to make him younger.

One of the (unintended?) consequences of changing the story so he met Christine as a young child when he was a young man was that it made him even more of a creep than in the musical or original book, where the age gap was probably greater, but she was an adult when he first noticed her.

And speaking of unintended consequences, in the stage adaptation of Cyrano this upcoming film is based on, Roxanne was played by a Black actress who was previously in Hamilton, and Christian by a white guy. The film flips that so that Christian is Black and Cyrano and Roxanne are white.

Christian is, well, a himbo. Having the handsome dumb Black guy ask a super articulate white dude to feed him romantic lines because he can't come up with anything but cliches himself is kind of ... *winces*

[meadowphoenix]

i mean the backstory is that people shunned him ~from birth~ because of his looks and that makes zero sense here (I'm still cracking up over "put your hand at the level of your eyes"), lmao, so I just imagine he had the most grating baby cry on earth.

none of the changes make any sense, but I'm pretty good with that with musicals with compelling music (see: me and Oklahoma), tho I understand why everyone else was frustrated with this mess. and yes, producers need to stop trying to "fix" female protagonists' weird decisions. they probably did that because they thought what kind of weirdo adult woman would believe in a an angel of music, but you know what a grieving isolated one with no money and whose only way to make it in the world is her voice that's who, let it go.

I was also not wholly a fan of that visual dyanmic in cyrano, and while I can't tell form the trailer, I don't think christian comes across as a himbo. just a person who doesn't articulate his feelings well. but i also have a problem with the entire plot, so we'll see i guess.

[(Anonymous)]

The 'hand at the level of your eyes' isn't really to do with his looks, though? It's a practical defense when the Phantom likes garotting people. You put your hand up so his noose catches your arm as well, not just your throat, and then you've leverage inside the loop to pull it off again. Which was what Madame Giry was demonstrating with that drunk helper dude who was singing about the Phantom's 'magical lasso'.

[meadowphoenix]

wow, I did not understand that lmao. thanks for the info!

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT--there's pro-published fanfic out there where his mom can only nurse baby Erik when his cry literally hypnotizes her, because she's so disgusted by what looks like the mummified corpse of a baby that when he starts to suckle (and his crying stops) she throws him across the room. It was basically a Draco in Leather Pants version of the original book, which gave him an Oedipus complex to match Christine's Electra complex snd made Christine a dead ringer for his mom (and a doormat.)

It had good bits, like the Persian's expanded backstory, and even though it's a total cliche I like the whole "good with children, animals, and old people" bits, but my favorite part is that the author probably used 19th century sources for her research, because when she wrote about his time in a Roma (Gypsy because yeah period accurate but also eesh) caravan, she must've pulled from the same sources Bram Stoker used writing Dracula.

She wrote that they believed he went to sorcerer school/the Scholomance (although she doesn't use the actual word) and rode a dragon and learned to make thunder and lightning from the Devil, which is what the peasants in Dracula believed about Dracula.

So I always wanted to write a fic where all the Universal monsters went to magician school together and annoyed the shit out of each other, with Erik the horse girl dragon guy and his long suffering roommate and total player Dracula.

[meadowphoenix]

See, this is what the public domain is for. That's honestly really in line with the OG novel, I sort of love the hypnotism aspect, and honestly adding tropey aspects works for melodramatic works like this. I kinda recognize some elements, why didn't ALW adapt that instead of Love Never Dies, so I wonder if I've encountered it before?

If Universal was still committed to doing their Monsters U, I would say sell it to them, since having magician school flashbacks in every movie would be freaking great! Seriously, tho, that sounds like a great fic OP!

[(Anonymous)]

Cyrano de Bergerac is a musical? I thought it was a regular play (haven't seen it obv).

[(Anonymous)]

It's a regular play that's been turned into a musical at least twice; once in the 1970s and once in 2019, and the 2019 version got turned into a movie that's coming out at the end of the year. Dinklage starred in the 2019 version and now in the movie.

The original play is by Edmund Rostand and is from, idk, 1894? 1897? Somewhere in there. So far as I know he took some random French early (1600s? 1700s?) sci-fi/fantasy writer who wrote about going to the moon and wrote a play using his name for the protagonist. I think(?) the real Cyrano was also a soldier or minor nobleman or something.

The play is about Cyrano, a soldier who's in love with his cousin Roxanne, who's being courted by an asshole duke but is in love with a soldier, Christian, who just joined Cyrano's regiment.

Christian is kind of a himbo; Roxanne loves witty repartee and poetry, and he despairs that Roxanne will dump him like a hot rock the second he tells her "ur super hot wanna bang?" Or, you know, the French equivalent from 1600-whatever.

Cyrano is a poet and duelist famous for his wit, but ashamed of his massive nose, and agrees to write letters to Roxanne from "Christian" because at least that way he can confess his feelings, even if she (and Christian, at least at first) have no clue he has them.

Then the plot goes from absurd romance comedy to "oh shit they're soldiers and there's a war on."

Rostand was French so the English versions of the play are all translations. One of them is by Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange and also wrote the lyrics to the 1970s musical.

Idk if there are any French musical versions. There are French and English filmed adaptations of the play out there, and a comedy version called Roxanne with Steve Martin. And Megamind is kind of based on it, or at least the romance plot is.

Sorry for the infodump essay, heh.

[(Anonymous)]

The Truth About Cats and Dogs was kind of based on it too, but gender-swapped.