okay so this post is wrong but what the heck it’s a Tumblr post, right, it’s mostly a joke, only it’s so perfectly echoing an idea I’ve seen elsewhere too, from actual paid critics and academic critiques, that Hugo “wasn’t writing for emotional teenagers”, that he’d be horrified by fandom, that he was too High and Erudite for the likes of  screaming theater kids and emotional teenagers

y’all. Y’all. 

Victor Hugo knew what fandom was.  And he absolutely LOVED it. 

Victor Hugo’s publicity campaign/ plan of ACTUAL ATTACK with the Hernani opening was to turn to a couple of Big Name Fans and go ‘GET ME TEENAGERS WITH ATTITUDE”.  He absolutely banked  on the Screaming Theater Kids contingent, on the emotional investment of the kind of fans who would memorize a script and shout lines back to it,  the sort of people who cosplay to premieres and drag all their friends to See The Thing eighty billionty times. 

This was not a one-off thing!  He opened his house to his fans, he loved  meeting people who said they’d started writing after being inspired by his work. He made a point of trying to answer letters from aspiring poets and authors with encouraging notes telling them to keep trying, you can do great things!  

His fans and his personal friends #tagged themselves with the names of characters. He made his friends into characters!

He knew fanfic existed, he knew fanart existed! Celestin Nanteuil, another of the Hernani-era Ascended Fans, started a working relationship with Hugo through his fanart, and they worked together on various projects for years, even travelling together for research and collaboration. And when Les Burgraves was tanking years later, it was Nanteuil he asked to bring in hundreds of young men to go Romantic Army again, believing that was the best hope for the play. (Nanteuil couldn’t do it, for multiple reasons, and the play bombed, so Hugo wasn’t exactly proven wrong, either.)

He tried to  become an Icon Of French Literature, yeah, and to get the respect of the Academy and so on . But he counted on the support of fans to get there, the support of excitable nerds and people who overanalyze novels and stay up to scream over emotions about fictional characters.  And once he was there, he never denounced or distanced himself from those fans; he was famously accessible to fans (like, to the point of getting evicted about it) and always delighted by the existence of fandom.  He always believed the new generation of readers was at LEAST as important as the older one.

And Les Mis!  Of all books!  People think Les Miserables wasn’t written for teenage girls!  THE SOURCE OF HOPE IN THE NOVEL IS A TEENAGE GIRL.  A girl who cares about fashion and flowers and gets smitten and thinks there might be ghosts in the garden and plays her music too loud to deal with emotions.  Hugo’s emotions about HIS teenage daughters are all over the thing! OF COURSE it was written for teenage girls, at least as much as for anyone else. 

And fandomwise?!? DO PEOPLE THINK VICTOR FRIGGING HUGO TURNED AWAY YOUNG WOMEN.  He got letters and visits from women calling themselves Cosette, Esmerelda, Eponine, Enjolras.  He loved it, he used those names when  he talked to them or wrote them back! 

As horrified as he would be that Les Mis is still relevant, he’d be so thrilled to look out into the audience and see it full of college students and teenagers and people crying because we just want them to all be happy, why can’t they be happy. Seriously. And it kind of kills me to see fans, especially teenagers and women,  talk themselves down, convinced that Hugo’s Too Important or Fancy for them to read and enjoy, that he wasn’t writing For Us. Hugo believed in The Kids These Days– every generation, every time, He believed in fandom. He would be so pissed  at anyone saying he wasn’t writing For Us because we’re not Good Enough.

Hugo’s branch of Romantics fought like hell for the idea that art belonged to everyone, that it had to be open to participation and transformative works, that there shouldn’t be gatekeepers deciding what stories people are allowed to love. Hugo was writing for people who’d cry their eyes out over Eponine and Valjean and make every political argument a question of What Would Enjolras Do a lot more than he was ever writing for some  Important Critic rolling their eyes about audiences who get their emotions all over literature.  

And hey, maybe I’m getting too emotional here. But I’ve talked to way too many people who’ve been convinced that they aren’t smart enough, or somehow not qualified enough , to read Hugo novels, and it makes me want to punch the world every time. 

There are definitely authors who only wrote for a certain elite. But Hugo was writing for people who would care.  And he was especially, ESPECIALLY writing for  young people who would care, because that’s who’s going to be around to care for the future.  Emotional teenagers, overinvested art nerds, fandom? That’s the audience he was counting on– to read his stories, to make art matter, to help change the world.