Les Mini Series: More thoughts on Part 4

OK...the more I think about some things from last weeks episode the more enraged I get about them, so I'm gonna write this post to vent some of my feelings about them because I don't think I really explained them well enough in my first post. Those are usually just my immediate reactions to the episode so this is after I've given it more thought.

I have so many problems with how Cosette is being portrayed in this mini series. Like I've said many times on this blog, Cosette is my favourite character and some of the things that Andrew Davies is doing to her on-screen is really disturbing to me.

I have two issues mainly that are getting to me and first off if Andrew Davies were here right now I'd ask him what the hell he his doing with Valjean and Cosettes relationship and why he's making it creepy. If you've watched the last episode you'll know what I mean. How dare he take one of the most tender and loving father daughter relationships in all of literature and twist it to become almost incestuous and paedophillic. Why did we need to see Valjean peeping on Cosette in her underwear? Was that necessary? Does he really think that was what Victor Hugo was intending with their relationship.

He does not understand the relationship between those two. They are two people who have suffered greatly and they have each never known love. So when they find each other they need each other desperately as father and child. There is nothing unseemly about their relationship and how Andrew Davies is degrading it is sick. It's just sick.

We have enough problems already in real life with the male gaze and the sexualisation of underage girls. Think about what's been happening in Hollywood right, now, think about the #metoo movement. There are enough creepy old men in the world and there are enough real paedophiles in the media being caught right now, so for the writer of this series to take Valjean and Cosette and imply that sort of thing between them has greatly upset me.
Andrew Davies has no right to do that to them and he has no right to do that to me. Their relationship is the light in the otherwise darkness of Les Miserables and he has perverted it.

My second issue that is getting to me is what he's done to Marius and Cosette, specifically the creepy wet dream sequence that was completely irrelevant to the story.
Cosette represents everything that is good, she is kind and sweet and innocent and nobody has the right to take all that from her and turn her into someones perverted wet dream. You will not do that to my Cosette, I will fucking fight you if you take Cosettes character and turn her into a male sexual fantasy.

What makes it worse is the fact that Ellie Bamber is so adorable as Cosette, she's cute as a button and I love her so much, but that just makes it all the more disturbing. They're sexualising a character who is essentially still a child at this point in the story because she's been so sheltered from the outside world. She still looks like a child in the character, she still talks like a child and still acts like a child and that just makes everything that's being implied by both Marius and Valjean even more unsettling.

If Andrew Davies were here right now in my flat I would fucking slap him. There is nothing right at all about what he's doing to Cosette. She is my favourite character in the entire novel and perhaps all of literature and I will fucking fight anyone who tries to hurt her. I will not have that shit in my house, nobody gets to hurt Cosette, especially not some sex obsessed writer who has taken one of the greatest novels ever written and twisted it into something I don't even recognise anymore.