Captain Nemo - Tumblr Posts
i talk at length about it in my video essay i'm working on, but without spoiling too much about that and/or the book itself, this bit in 20k is why the book NEEDS aronnax as the narrator. aronnax isn't just A sheltered white european academic, he's Symbolic Of sheltered white european academics. for all his talk about logic and science and being above emotion, he's still completely overtaken by victorian concepts of race, colonialism, and eurocentrism. and again without spoiling everything, nemo is driven by his incredibly complex relation/opposition to exactly that, and exactly the type of person aronnax is and represents. for how close they are the rest of the time, chapters like these force aronnax to show his hand and reveal why he can never truly meet nemo where he is.
So I just realized that two of my fictional crushes/blorbos- Captain Nemo, the OG literary crush, and Trafalgar Law, my latest interest- are tall, dark, and handsome submarine captains with anti-authoritarian beliefs and tragic backstories that made them devote their lives to enacting revenge against the people/entities that killed their loved ones.
I mean, the similarities end there- Nemo is (in my eyes, anyway) far more morally complex than Law, and while both had their families killed by government forces, Law's revenge is focused not on the government, but on the person who killed his surrogate father figure who helped him after the tragedy that killed his blood family, whereas Nemo's family was killed in a rebellion against an empire that had taken control of their home and Nemo's revenge is focused indiscriminately on any representatives of that empire- but I'm not saying "these characters are so similar!," I'm wondering... do I have a type
it's still so funny to me about twenty thousand leagues that with the polish to indian edit, jules verne failed upwards into making a far more progressive point about imperialism and period racism by making a man who is by all measures a wealthy genius who possesses knowledge that the western world could barely conceive of
an indian man.
which would have been an entirely unheard of concept. just the other day my mother sent me some stuff her older brother dug up from the indian colonial period (in case this breaches containment: i am indian-american, my mother and her brother were born in india and their parents experienced the end of the colonial period and the partition) including records that indian natives needed a permit to use a chair in a british office.
it might have been a behind the scenes edit to avoid provoking russia but making nemo "prince dakkar of bundelkhand" says something a hundred times more profound than the original draft.
too early to make assumptions, but the fact that disney is rewriting captain nemo's backstory in their upcoming series so he steals his submarine from the english instead of building it himself feels gross to me
The character Dakkar will be voiced by JESSE BHAMRAH
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Pulp Musicals, Episode 4 drops from the clouds in August. Pulp Musicals is a musical radio series created by Matt Dahan.
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Portrait by Jackie Franco