Comment on WhatsApp [Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo]

MyDarkestTimeline01@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• tgirlschierke@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  this is an iteration of the (mostly post-ironic) meme “what if X franchise had whatsapp?”, depicting a character’s inbox of direct messages. spoilers for a series based on a book from 1844 below:

  spoiler

  - Throughout the series, Edmond Dantes (the titular Count) manipulates a variety of people to achieve his vengeance against a bunch of nobles, primarily Fernand Mondego, for falsely putting him for 20 years in the space torture prison Chateau d’lf, mostly due to Fernand wanting to marry Mercedes, a woman who Edmond was in love with. - Contact #1 is Haydee Tebelin, a musician who was once princess of a region of Eastern Space before having her parents killed and then being sold into slavery by Fernand. She has now been pseudo-adopted by the Count to take down Fernand. - Contacts #2 and #3 are Mercedes and her son, who has quite a few scenes of homoerotic subtext with the Count. According to TVTropes, in an interview, Albert and Count’s scenes together were described as almost romantic, but I don’t have the energy to track that down at the moment and am not sure which search terms I would use. The line is a commonality across different variations of the meme. (Sidenote: Albert is 14-15 and definitionally being groomed by Edmond by being manipulated in order to fulfill his vengeance. I’m not endorsing any romantic connection between them, simply pointing out the subtext in the show suggesting it.) - Contact #4 is Franz d’Epinay, who repeatedly shows interest in Albert throughout the series. - Contacts #5 and #6 are Eugenie de Danglars and Andrea Cavalcanti, children of other nobles that have wronged Edmond. Eugenie is engaged to Albert, but Andrea despises this. He’s generally a terrible person, and at one point even attempts to rape Eugenie. In Episode 20, after she leaves for a foreign country, he settles for an… Oedipal option instead. - Contact #7 is Peppo, a side character who appears throughout the series, and ends its first episode by luring Albert into a dark alleyway for sex before pulling a gun on him and performing a kidnapping. - Contact #8 is the titular Gankutsuou, a kind of eldritch daemon that awakened within Edmond’s mind during his imprisonment in Chateau d’lf.

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